Taking care of migrants instead of funding war
The Paper of Record tells us that providing for the hundreds of migrants arriving in the city daily will cost "The City" $12 billion. The City, in case anyone's wondering, translates to We, The Taxpayers. Before anyone starts griping about that, however, let's keep in mind that somehow we've managed to send anywhere from $75 billion to $113 billion to fund that mess over in Ukraine (depending on your source, some sources put it at $200 billion but after the first set of nine zeros it all gets very murky).
While shaking our fists and stomping our feet about paying taxes is a venerable tradition in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, I'm here to say that I am A-OK with my taxes going to shelter the migrants seeking asylum here.
I saw the below headline in a not long ago and almost cheered. This is right up there with putting the homeless into hotels at the onset of the pandemic. Of course, it took the nice white liberals of the Upper West Side about an hour and a half to clutch their pearls about those nasty homeless men peeing where little Baxter does his business.
Still, I liked the idea of street people having a little break from sleeping on the street. And I really like knowing that exhausted, frightened, disoriented people forced from their homes are finally getting a decent night's sleep. However, after doing my little happy dance around the living room I realized that this was not the intended reaction.
I was supposed to be outraged!
The thousand-plus commenters certainly were. Maybe you are.
Know what outrages me?
$858 billion in military spending for Fiscal Year 2023. Not only is that unconscionable, it’s actually 6% more than what our supposed "leaders" asked for. That is not an excellent use of my tax money, Elected Public Servants. All those disgusting — oooooo, we don’t call them wars — that have left entire regions from Southeast Asia to the Balkans to the Middle East in smoking ruins are paid for by you and me, little worker bees.
If I have to get up before I feel like it to log on and earn my daily bread — as I do and so do many of us — I feel a lot better about that bit that’s skimmed off the top going to make sure a migrant sleeps comfortably tonight. After all, chances are very good that the migrant would not be a migrant if not for this country’s “interventions”. Major apologies to the global south on that score.
So while the cranky old white men at the New York Post are foaming at the mouth to make sure all the other frightened cranky white people are in a good Godly panic over brown people being afforded simply human hospitality, I say, welcome.
After all, it's not as if our guests are getting a chocolate on their pillows or complimentary terry cloth robes with their initials embroidered on the breast pocket. But it calms some of my daily rage to imagine them having hot showers and a good night’s sleep in big, comfortable beds.
And since the Feds are going to continue dipping into my earnings regardless, I'll continue heralding any penny that gets spent on improving just about anyone's life.
While we're at it, let's talk about reparations for the descendants of the millions of people kidnapped from Africa for hundreds of years who were used as free labor throughout the industrialized world, shall we? Somehow, it's become radical to call this what it was: a crime against humanity.
Excellent use of my tax money.
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