Why?

The East Texas town of Alto, 140 miles southeast of Dallas, just shut down its entire police department because it could no longer afford it.

The police department in Prospect Heights, Illinois, is now closed on weekends.

The 13,000 residents of Half Moon Bay in San Mateo County on the California coast are now without a police force too.

Schools in Pennsylvania, Oregon, Texas, California, Georgia, Hawaii and Minnesota are either considering a four-day school week or have already made the change.

Yet we’ve spent $786,611,408,094 to date on the unnecessary war in Iraq.

And we’ve spent $432,257,498,866 to date on the unnecessary war in Afghanistan, which has killed 1,002 U.S. soldiers since Barack Obama took office.

Air conditioning alone for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan costs over $20 billion per year.

Why?

Maintaining Dubya’s tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans will reduce revenue by about $690 billion over the next 10 years. When you add the costs of additional debt service, the true price of maintaining these tax cuts jumps by almost $140 billion. This means keeping the tax cuts for the rich will cost almost $830 billion over the next 10 years.

According to AmericanProgress.org:

To put that figure in perspective, $830 billion is enough to pay for all veterans’ hospitals, doctors, and the rest of the Veteran’s Affairs health system, plus the United States Coast Guard, plus the Food and Drug Administration, plus the operation and maintenance of every single national park for the entire 10-year period — with more than $100 billion left over.

We could stop laying off teachers, firefighters and police officers and reducing the school week for our students. (American schoolchildren already study less or perform worse academically than students in Germany, Japan, India, Denmark, Sweden, China and other countries.) We could give tax relief to the middle class. We could invest more in research, rebuild crumbling roads and bridges, help more of the unemployed or even pay down the national debt.

Instead, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Why?

Dwight D. Eisenhower was a Republican, the type who doesn’t exist anymore, a moderate conservative who ended the Korean War, created the highway system, enlarged the scope of Social Security and continued FDR’s New Deal policies of relief for the unemployed and poor; recovery of the economy; and reform of the financial system. A five-star general who was Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower served as 34th President of the United States from 1953 to 1961. In April of 1953, just a few weeks into his presidency, Eisenhower said the following in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

Why aren’t today’s politicians listening?


Sources: Americanprogress.org, Thinkprogress.org, costofwar.com.