By Miles Mathis
I searched on this question recently and got no good data, which is why I am writing this paper. The Google search engine was topped by a link to Warresisters.org, which is curious in itself. You would think that government statistics sites would outrank a small site of war resisters. Normally Wikipedia and Yahoo-answers and sites like that lead all searches, on pretty much all topics. Which leads me to suspect this “war resisters” site is a fake. Remember, anyone can set up any site they like and title it anything they like. Just because the site says it is a site of war resisters doesn't mean it is. What adds fuel to this suspicion is this chart, which the site leads with:
That chart, or one like it, is all over the internet. We know that it is manufactured and false, since it doesn't even include a slice for “servicing the debt”, which is and always has been huge. It was huge when I was a kid and wrote a paper like this for my class, and it is far larger now. I can tell at a glance that the military slice is also far too small. While it looks like the military slices have been maximized to equal over 50%, they have actually been minimized. Yes, this chart and this website are undoubtedly the work of either the Pentagon or the Federal Reserve.
That human resources slice is also ridiculously large. We are told it is only 6% less than the current military budget. I don't need a report from the GAO to know that is false.
You shouldn't need any footnotes from me to know this chart is a fake. It is outrageously illogical in all ways, and goes against every fact of life we know. It is only sad that the government thinks so little of our intelligence that it would even publish such garbage.
As another example, you may ask yourself why the pies are titled things like “human resources” and “physical resources.” The compilers of this chart are deflecting you with cloudy language, so that you can't unwind any of this. Just think about it: you could label a large part of the military as “human resources,” since a large number of people work for the military. Are all military salaries in that pie? Who knows? This chart is pure propaganda.
It only takes a little math and logic to discover the truth, even without consulting the various government reports and statistics (which are known to be fudged). While we don't know exactly how many trillions of dollars we are in debt, as a country, we know it is a staggering number. I have seen estimates from 14 trillion to 100 trillion, and even higher. But we don't need a firm number. We just need to know we are in debt, which means we are spending far more than we are taking in. And that means we have a different way of analyzing a chart like this.
I will simplify my analysis by looking at only two pieces of pie: the pie that goes to the military and the pie that goes to the bankers. Servicing the debt goes straight to the bankers, since they are the ones who collect the interest. Bailing out the banks also goes straight to the bankers, obviously, and bailing out Wall Street goes to them also, or the lion's share, since Wall Street is run by investment firms, which are owned by banks or other financial entities. So we may label one pie “stolen by the banks,” and the other pie, “stolen by the military.”
You will say, “Stolen? How did the military steal it?” Well, beyond the fact that they have billed us for a lot of stuff they never delivered, and overbilled us for stuff they did deliver (remember the $500 toilet seat?), they have given us wars we didn't need and didn't want, and failed to protect us from terrorism they themselves created. Our “defense” spends about 20 times what Russia or China spends, and delivers no defense. We only have offense. Are the wars in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and so on wars of defense? No, they are offensive wars, by which we are looting large parts of the world. If our defense were really defensive, we would need only about 5% of it, as we can see from Russia or China. No one is attacking Russia or China, are they? Beyond that, we found out on September 11, 2001, that our military apparently cannot defend itself against box cutters or nail clippers. The top brass testified in Congress that only four jets are on the ground to protect ¼ of the US, which is why there was no response on that day. And even those four jets were not launched. Which, according to my math means we pay around a trillion dollars a year for nothing. Or, domestically we pay to get a handful of jets which can't launch, while in other countries we pay our offensive military to murder innocent people and steal all their resources. That is worse than stealing, really, since the thieves are then murdering and stealing in your name, with your taxes. They are stealing from you and then making you a murderer and a thief through their actions.
So, we have “stolen by the banks” and “stolen by the military.” What percentage of the total pie is that, without looking at any other pieces? Well, we already know it is way over 100%, since that is why the country is in debt. If the bankers and the military were stealing less than all the taxes, we wouldn't be in debt, would we? We are in debt because they are stealing more money than is coming into the treasury. And they are raising the debt ceiling, so that they can steal even more from the future treasury. Yes, they are not just stealing from you at this point, they are stealing from the unborn.
How much more than 100% are they stealing each year? It is impossible to say, since we have to rely on the statistics of the thieves. In the past, they were only stealing 120-
150%, which, with some creative accounting, could be made to seem almost sustainable. But since 2008, that number has risen dramatically, and is now something like 300-
1000%. They have stolen so much in the past 4 years that it would take centuries to pay it back at current tax levels.
You can expect tax levels to rise (on the poor and middle-class, at least), but they have other ways of stealing that money from you. First, they will devalue your cash via inflation, which is a subtler way of taking your money. At the same time they will cut your wages and increase prices, which is more stealing from you. Then they will encourage you to buy gold and silver, which they can confiscate later, while they are confiscating your guns. You will say they can't do that, but they have done it before (read your history). They did all this in the last depression, and there was no revolution or major uprising, so they figure they can do it again. The Nazis also did all these things not so long ago, and they encountered very little resistance from within. Remember, the Nazis were defeated from outside, in a war, not in a revolution. Who is going to defeat your Nazis for you?
Same with the Russians. They had a revolution, but only managed to replace one set of thieves with another. All in all they were probably better off under the Czars than under Stalin or any of the rest. And we could say the same now, about either Russia or the US or any other country: the thieves are stealing a bigger piece of the total pie now than any King or Czar ever did. The 400 biggest thieves in the US have more wealth than 50% of the country.1 And the wealth of these 400 thieves has quadrupled in the past 12 years. At the same time, their taxes have halved.2 Worldwide, the richest people (the billionaires) have seen their wealth rise 14% in 2010 and 22% in 2011, for a total of 40% in just two years!3 This, while the total pie has gotten smaller. In the US, total wealth plummeted 26% from 2007 to 2009, even according to mainstream sources4, and it has continued to fall since then. The only reason total wealth isn't in a complete nosedive is that the wealthy are getting so much wealthier.
So let's do some math. If total worldwide wealth has fallen say 30% since 2007, and billionaires have gotten 40% richer in that time, how much more of the total pie do they have now? Basically it means they have more than doubled their piece of the pie in just two years!
This is what makes it so difficult to get good numbers for a paper like this: the rise in wealth among the richest masks the precipitous fall in wealth for the rest of us. A 30% fall in worldwide wealth equates to 75 trillion in losses by the rest of us, but you won't find that number in your standard charts online. Do a search on “worldwide wealth”, and you only get charts on the wealth of HNWI's.5 What are HNWI's? That stands for High Net Worth Individuals. Those are apparently the only people that count anymore, to these statisticians.
So the answer to our original question, “Where does your money go?” is this: your money goes directly to the pockets of bankers and military suppliers and government operatives. Only a tiny percentage goes to infrastructure or to helping people in any way, and that tiny percentage is being cut while you read this. I would estimate that out of every dollar you pay in federal taxes or fees, only a small part of a penny goes to anything any sensible person would want to see done. 99.9+% goes to the military, to the bankers, to domestic spy programs or gestapos like the CIA, the NSA, the DHS, the TSA, the DEA, the ATF, FEMA, and Blackwater, or to asinine federal departments or agencies like the department of education, which does everything possible to see that people aren't educated; or the NEA, which does everything possible to prevent the outbreak of art; or the Farm Bureau, which does everything possible to ensure Monsanto takes over the world; or the FDA, which does everything possible to protect the drug companies against you; or the EPA, which does everything possible to shield polluters; and of course the SEC, which makes sure Goldman Sachs gets away with looting the country. In a nutshell, the government exists to use your own money against you, so that not only are you paying for a list of things you very much wish wouldn't happen, you are paying to build a wall around the people doing those things, so that you cannot stop them from doing it.