Our tax dollars should make life better, not go to waste. But the average taxpayer had to shell out over $1,000 for military contractors alone last year.

The president’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year, released March 9, was heralded by human needs groups for preserving and in some cases expanding critical human needs programs to address poverty, hunger, health care, and protect children and seniors in particular. 

But as our chart shows, the Biden budget continues to fund the Pentagon and war at levels that far outpace all federal programs for housing, education, public health, and more.

The war claimed more than lives and treasure — it claimed a future’s worth of lost opportunities. Now, younger generations are demanding them back.

For 20 years, the Department of Homeland Security has made life a nightmare for millions — but Dreamers like me have seen that there’s another way.

Current military spending is higher than the height of military spending during the Reagan years at the height of the Cold War. Looking further back, the Biden request is higher than the height of the Vietnam or Korean wars, too. 

While more than half of the federal discretionary budget under the president’s proposal would go to the military, fully two-thirds would go to a combination of the military, veterans’ programs, and heavily militarized homeland security programs. 

What would be possible if we had an extra $100 billion to spend on urgent human needs? 

Yesterday, two anti-immigrant amendments that would have extended the legacy of the draconian Trump-era immigration policy, Title 42, each took the Senate floor for a vote. Both failed. 

Can you imagine the audacity to fail a multi-trillion dollar audit of public funds, and then ask for even more of those taxpayer dollars?

It’s time for progressives to add our voices and demand demilitarization so that people in Hawai’i, Guam, Okinawa and elsewhere can live free from the environmental and human degradations imposed by the U.S. military.