New Haven, CT, Charlottesville, VA, and Montgomery County, MD, have passed resolutions opposing the Trump budget's moving of money from everything else to the military, urging that money be moved in the opposite direction.
Pittsburgh and Ann Arbor have denounced the "cuts" in the Trump budget without ever mentioning the existence of the U.S. military.
There are no cuts in the Trump budget proposal. There is the moving of money from everything else to the military. This matters for a number of reasons.
When advocates of "small government" hear nothing but opposition to supposed cuts, they come out in favor of the cuts. This happened at the Charlottesville city council meeting where its resolution was passed. A member of the public spoke up in favor of all the cuts and Trump's supposedly smaller budget.
Trump has proposed the same size budget as last year's. If its opponents want to stop it, they will have to admit as much and stop misinforming people that the Trump budget is smaller.
In addition, refusing to oppose any military spending no matter what is, of course, a license for infinite military spending, already topping 60% of discretionary spending in Trump's budget proposal, not counting future supplemental bills off-the-books likely to take it to 65%. We haven't seen that since Ronald Reagan lived in the White House.
That military spending endangers us, creates blowback, drains our resources, erodes our rights, destroys our natural environment, and takes funding away from all the good things Trump is proposing to take it away from.
Your town or city or county should get this right. Here are steps you can take:
- Contact worldbeyondwar.org to ask for help
- Form a coalition of local groups concerned about the cuts, the military increase, or both
- Find out how to speak publicly at local government meetings and how to submit a proposal or get one on the agenda for a vote; or ask council members/ aldermen / supervisors to sponsor it.
- Collect organizations' or prominent people's or lots of people's names on a petition
- Hold rallies, press conferences
- Write op-eds, letters, go on radio, tv
- Use tofwar.com to calculate local trade-offs
- Revise the draft below:
Resolution Proposed for __________, ___
Whereas President Trump has proposed to move $54 billion from human and environmental spending at home and abroad to military spending[i], bringing military spending to well over 60% of federal discretionary spending[ii],
Whereas part of helping alleviate the refugee crisis should be ending, not escalating, wars that create refugees[iii],
Whereas President Trump himself admits that the enormous military spending of the past 16 years has been disastrous and made us less safe, not safer[iv],
Whereas fractions of the proposed military budget could provide free, top-quality education from pre-school through college[v], end hunger and starvation on earth[vi], convert the U.S. to clean energy[vii], provide clean drinking water everywhere it's needed on the planet[viii], build fast trains between all major U.S. cities[ix], and double non-military U.S. foreign aid rather than cutting it[x],
Whereas even 121 retired U.S. generals have written a letter opposing cutting foreign aid[xi],
Whereas a December 2014 Gallup poll of 65 nations found that the United States was far and away the country considered the largest threat to peace in the world[xii],
Whereas a United States responsible for providing clean drinking water, schools, medicine, and solar panels to others would be more secure and face far less hostility around the world,
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