Move Our Money is an amazing organization (and site)

March 5, 2000 4:10 PM

Move Our Money is an amazing organization (and site) that seeks to raise awareness of our continued military spending in the US. The site is interesting, especially the running tally at the top left showing how many dollars have been funneled to the pentagon during your session, and a chart that should amaze and possibly anger you. Good use of sideways scrolling there...
posted by mathowie (4 comments total)

Unfortunately, they leave out the largest segment of our budget, which is interest payments on our rising national debt. It's definitely true that we piss a lot of money away on defense, but it's even sadder that we spend more money on interest than on anything else.

In that sense, our national government is like a compulsive credit card spender who winds up spending more money trying to keep the debt collectors from harrassing them than they do on the stuff that they got the credit cards for in the first place.

The worst part of all is that the Republicans want to cut taxes rather than paying down our national debt, which is one of the most cynical policy stances I've ever witnessed. They want to give us a little money back now and keep paying interest in the long term instead of retiring debt and saving us all a ton of money in the future. We're in an incredible boom period in the economy right now, and yet we're still not paying off our debts. Argh!

By the way, federal government revenue from corporate taxes dropped last year by 2% (in the greatest expansionary period in US history) even as tax receipts from individuals rose 6%.

Military spending is really the tip of the iceberg when it comes to poor financial policy.
posted by rafeco at 7:55 PM on March 5, 2000

I got some good news for you:

For the last year, our national debt has been falling. The budget surplus has been going into paying down the debt.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 11:14 PM on March 5, 2000

Here is more proof that the government is screwing everybody:
Income from taxes on individuals ~45%
Income from taxes on corporations ~10%
Check out the historical trends here here
posted by miguelbar at 7:26 AM on March 6, 2000

Yeah, Move Our Money didn't cite any sources and it left some programs off the chart. I appreciate the point they're trying to make, but you can make it just as well if you tell the truth.
posted by veruca at 2:30 PM on March 10, 2000