Please Vote to freeze the Pentagon budget!

In the midst of a struggle to provide health care for millions of Americans and create more jobs, President Obama has just announced that he will freeze non-security domestic spending at $447 billion per year. That’s for everything except Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs. Guess what won’t be frozen? The $708 billion we will spend on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and many obsolete Cold War weapons systems.

What would you rather see America investing in? Yesterday our friends at Change.org launched “Ideas for Change in America 2010”, and your vote could help put peace and human needs at the top of our nation’s priorities.

And when I say “priorities,” it’s about putting our money where our mouths are.

Here’s what I mean. While Congress argues over how they can’t possibly find the funds to insure the 45,000 uninsured Americans who die every year, our total cost of wars since 2001 will top a trillion dollars in 2010. Just the addition of 30K troops to Afghanistan will cost us $82 million each day!

However, since the wars have been funded through “emergency” supplementals to the Pentagon’s budget, this does NOT include money spent just running the military, maintaining our massive nuclear arsenal, and buying new weaponry. If you tack on that spending, you have more than half of our nation’s discretionary spending, plus our growing foreign debt.

Do you think there are better things to do with all this money? If so, please click here to cast your vote, then share this post with five of your friends. Because by cutting the bloated Pentagon budget, we could rebuild America, putting people back to work in a green economy, providing health insurance to every American, and rebuilding our broken education system. We could even improve intelligence and security so a man with a bomb in his underwear can’t attempt to take down an airliner. We would then be in a position to really help countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Haiti with economic and humanitarian aid that would help them rebuild their countries, free from military occupation.

Change.org will take the top ideas and present them to the Obama administration in March. President Obama has said he wants to curb wasteful military spending. Please show him we want this, not war, to top his agenda. Then please pass this on to five of your friends.