The Daily Background
| Live chickens, AK-47s, and Misplaced Tax Money
by Arlen Parsa
Larry Kahaner, author of “AK-47: The Weapon That Changed the Face of War” wrote in the second paragraph of a 2686-word Washington Post feature yesterday:
The AK-47 has become the world’s most prolific and effective combat weapon, a device so cheap and simple that it can be bought in many countries for less than the cost of a live chicken.
That’s kind of disturbing in and of itself, isn’t it? Thinking about that forces you to re-evaluate the type of world we live in, really. A world in which instruments of death and destruction are offered more readily than instruments of life and survival. But this sort of misplaced priority isn’t just the status quo in places like the Congo or Afghanistan.
The subject of misplaced priorities reminds me of a campaign started by Ben of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. The idea is that for the amount of money that the federal government spends on weapons, and the amount of money spent on things that actually help Americans (healthcare, schools, etc) is grossly disproportionate.
In one PSA, Ben notes that the United States has the equivalent of 150,000 Hiroshima sized bombs. “It costs the our country over 17 billion dollars a year to maintain those nuclear weapons and their delivery systems.” Ben continues “but for that amount of money, we could rebuild all of our schools, and provide Head Start and healthcare for every kid who needs it.”
In an interview which you can watch here, Ben gives more specific trade-offs that America could make to redistribute existing tax money to actually help American citizens, instead of spending that money on weapons and war. He uses Oreo cookies as visuals to demonstrate a point in a very meaningful way. Recommended viewing. Traditional fiscal conservatives have always been about rooting out wasted tax money, and I’ve often thought that if there was a way to demonstrate how pointless having such overwhelming-to-the-point-of-being-useless weaponry is, that they’d side with progressives and populists on this issue.
