US Deploys Nuclear Sub to Persian Gulf; New Reason to Protest IRS :)

US Nuclear submarine, like one pictured above,
just took off to visit Persian Gulf
and the general Iran neighborhood

Not to pick on you Nick, but I disagree on not protesting the IRS....so much so I have to write a big post instead of just a comment on yours :) It is true that every dime Bush has asked Congress for the war has been on an emergency supplemental....not in our budget. Our adventures in Iraq as well as Afghanistan have been funded entirely on debt. For the first time in American history, taxes go DOWN in wartime.

Well, sort of. As we know, 43% of our tax dollars went to military spending last year. You can't just subtract out the largest defense system on the planet and not include it in fighting two wars that are breaking down the military. After all, we spend half of what the entire world collectively spends on defense.... you can't just pretend like that is totally separate from bombing Iraq an average of 4 times a day.

Everything from the ammunition and tanks to the cluster bomb stockpiles to the fighter jets....we use what we had in storage for raining fire on Iraq and Afghanistan, and then Bush asks for "emergency supplementals" to "refresh" our supplies. Then that exhaustion of the military gets factored in for the next years...and lo and behold, the Pentagon then asks us to increase military spending!

We can't just subtract the fact that the war planners are being paid on our tax dollars.... this is all of course just the beginning. Look, the money for the so-called "War on Terror" is fungible. They have done it before...taken money from the Pentagon before getting the funds from Congress. Just like we started bombing Iraq intensively months before authorization from Congress for a full scale get out Saddam mission. (That is right, over 54 tons dropped on southern Iraq in September 2002...a month before Congress authorized it. Of course we had been bombing Iraq off and on since 1990, but we escalated air power on Iraq right up before the invasion to provoke a retaliation from Saddam.)

Besides, plenty of other things to protest at the IRS about...we just deployed a nuclear submarine to the Persian Gulf, amidst rumors that Cheney is telling our friendly Arab dictators that next target is Iran.

And what would happen from a cold fiscal view if we went to war with Iran? Long after bombing Iran Bush and Cheney would politely request money from Congress for an "emergency" supplemental. Let's remember that a large majority of Congress voted against the idea that congressional authorization for attacking Iran was necessary.

So, to the extent that protest is how you can be most effective, protest at the IRS, protest at the Federal Reserve....there are many different players in promoting the de-stabilization of the Middle East. And we will certainly be paying off this war on debt, but we are also paying it with our own entire tax-payer funded defense system and defense capabilities...not to mention the whole ethical part of bombing a people (or multiple peoples) and stripping their sovereignty and what that does to our security situation...or soul.