The Post reports this morning that President Bush is requesting an addition $42.3 billion to finance the war in Iraq in the 2008 fiscal year, bringing the total funding request for the year to $190 billion. Of course almost none of the Post readers has any idea how much money this is – yet the Post refuses to express its budget numbers in a way that would be meaningful to readers.
The 2008 request is equal to approximately 6.3 percent of projected spending for the year. It comes to $630 for every person in the country. By comparison, Congress proposed spending $7 billion a year more on the State Children’s Heath Insurance Program (SCHIP) than President Bush requested. This difference is approximately equal to what President Bush will spent on the war in Iraq in two weeks.
A second Trump administration will cement a right-wing majority on the Supreme Court for a generation, and put our collective future in the hands of someone who will be virtually unchecked by our institutions. The country has shifted rightward, and the reverberations will ensue for potentially the next few decades. In this climate, a robust independent media ecosystem will be more important than ever. We're committed to bringing you the latest news on how Trump's agenda will actually affect the American people, shining a light on the stories corporate media overlooks and keeping the public informed about how power really works in this country.
Quality journalism is expensive to produce, and we don't have corporate backers to rely on to fund what we do. Everything we do is thanks to our incredible community of readers, who chip in a few dollars at a time to make our work possible. Any amount you give today will help us continue reporting on what matters to our democracy.
