The cost for each US soldier deployed in Afghanistan: $1.2 million. 

A Letter to My Recently Elected Member of Congress
Al Mytty / Special to Environmentalists Against War

CHAMPAIGN, IL (November 9, 2022) — Congratulations to Representative-elect Nikki Budzinski!  I am proud to have voted for you and look forward to being your constituent.  At your website, I see Veterans as an issue but not Military Spending.  As a proud member of Veterans for Peace, I am grateful that you support veterans.

With your experience at OMB, you’re an expert on the Federal budget, and I hope you will support reprioritizing that budget.  Our country needs it desperately.

In the article below, Adm. Charles A. Richard, who leads the US Strategic Command, the unified combatant command responsible for US nuclear weapons, tells us that the war in Ukraine is ‘just the warmup’ for the ‘big one’ with China.

Not surprisingly, he proposes vast increases in US taxpayer money for more weapons.

We already spend 2.5 TIMES WHAT CHINA AND RUSSIA SPEND COMBINED!

And we know from past arms races that the more we spend, the more our adversaries spend.

But the military contractors, the Pentagon, and sadly, the President and Congress keep urging us to spend more.

We spend $22.4 BILLION a year on nuclear weapons, weapons that the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has outlawed and Pope Francis has called immoral.

With that money, we could hire 200,000 nurses, or 245,000 teachers, or provide solar electricity for 64 million households.

Heck, we could end world starvation for,  $30 billion a year,  just 4% of what is spent on the Pentagon and military contractors, and 1% of what we spend on war and preparation for war.  Adm. Richard is urging us to spend even more.

And as President Eisenhower warned us decades ago, “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.”

Does anyone really believe that spending more on war and preparation for war will lead to lasting peace? This is not how we want our tax dollars spent!

Sincerely,
Alan Mytty