(Cross-posted at Skundered!)

The combined cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has now reached $1.29 trillion , and the President asked for $170 billion more to keep these two projects on life support for another year.

As Truthdig’s Bill Boyarsky recently pointed out: 

The Afghanistan request alone, according to the National Priorities Project, is enough to provide health care for 55 million low-income children for a year or hire 1.6 million teachers or furnish Veterans Administration health care for almost 14 million vets.

Now that we’re safely past April 15th, it’s a good time to reflect on exactly how much of this bill we’re responsible for as individuals.    The folks at Rethink Afghanistan have put together a nifty tax calculator that allows you to determine the exact amount of your tax bill that went to pay for the war in Afghanistan and other military spending.  They’ve set the form up in an invoice-template so that they can be printed out and presented to elected representatives as an I.O.U.  Check it out.

About the Author

TomT

TomT will be posting under his real name here (at least part of it), in spite of the fact that this site already seems to be crammed-full of Toms. He is a suburban husband and dad doing Union work within public education in the Chicago area. Once in a great while he also posts diaries under the name “Skitters” on Daily Kos, and—during football season—he does his best to chronicle the dark history of a fairly-vicious fantasy league.

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