The $7.5 Billion the Feds Have Confiscated from Kentuckians

$7.5 Billion. That's what Kentucky taxpayers have paid for Smirky/Darth's pointless desert clusterfucks since 2001. And it's going up $50 every second.

You can watch it increase at breathtaking speed here, at Cost of War dot com. The counter shows totals for all wars since 2001, just Iraq and just Afghanistan for the whole country, then the three totals broken down for each state, and even for selected cities in each state.

(Mount Sterling, you're completely fucked, having shelled out $8.8 million and counting.)

$7.5 billion confiscated from Kentucky taxpayers to buy the deaths of 83 of our finest young people.

What would $7.5 billion buy in Kentucky, after we'd used 20 percent of it to close our budget deficit? A billion to bury every power line in the state? Another billion to upgrade the grid, bringing cheap broadband internet and the ability to generate your own electricity to every home? A billion to build freight railroads that will remove deadly truckers from our highways? A billion to buy every fucking coal mine, shut it down and put everyone to work restoring the streams and forests and establishing a world-leading renewable energy industry?

One local official has taken a small step in that direction, as Jo Comerford in The Nation explains:

Matt Ryan, the mayor of Binghamton, New York, is sick and tired of watching people in local communities "squabble over crumbs," as he puts it, while so much local money pours into the Pentagon's coffers and into America's wars. He's so sick and tired of it, in fact, that, urged on by local residents, he's decided to do something about it. He's planning to be the first mayor in the United States to decorate the facade of City Hall with a large, digital "cost of war" counter, funded entirely by private contributions.

That counter will offer a constantly changing estimate of the total price Binghamton's taxpayers have been paying for our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since October 2001. By September 30, 2010, the city's "war tax" will reach $138.6 million--or even more if, as expected, Congress passes an Obama administration request for supplemental funds to cover the president's "surge" in Afghanistan. Mayor Ryan wants, he says, to put the counter "where everyone can see it, so that my constituents are urged to have a much-needed conversation."

In doing so, he's joining a growing chorus of mayors, including Chicago's Richard Daley and Boston's Thomas Menino, who are ever more insistently drawing attention to what Ryan calls the country's "skewed national priorities," especially the local impact of military and war spending. With more than three years left in his current term, Ryan has decided to pull out all the stops to reach his neighbors and constituents, all 47,000 of them, especially the near quarter of the city's inhabitants who currently live below the poverty line and the 9 percent who are officially unemployed.

Read the whole thing.