Ben Cohen: Kucinich will fix our priorities
Originally published in the Boston Globe
Kucinich will fix our priorities
By Ben Cohen, 1/19/2004
MOST WOULD agree with this modest request of the next president of the United States: Please waste fewer of our tax dollars on special interests and instead spend more on our schools, health care, the environment, the poor, and the hungry at home and abroad.
There's only one candidate running for president who has a practical plan to do this. That candidate is congressman Dennis Kucinich.
While all the Democratic candidates are infinitely better than President Bush -- only Kucinich advocates changing the way our government spends our tax dollars in order to reflect the values of America's people. How we spend our money as a nation reflects our values and beliefs.
Our nation's checkbook tells us that America's priorities are really wrong -- and Kucinich is the one candidate bold enough to say so.
He calls for funding human needs such as universal health care, education, environmental cleanup, and expanded programs for the poor, the cities, and the elderly, and he says it can be done with no additional taxpayer expense.
Please, explain this one to me, you're saying. Well, it's simple. Kucinich calls for trimming 15 percent from the Pentagon budget, which gobbles up a billion dollars a day and is so replete with waste that defense contractors are having a feeding frenzy on our tax dollars.
Star Wars, nuclear submarines, tanks so heavy they can't get to the battlefield -- all outmoded systems that were designed to thwart a Soviet Union that no longer exists. It's past time to scuttle these boondoggles. And we can do this without threatening national security -- according to bipartisan experts, including Ronald Reagan's defense aide Lawrence Korb.
Other candidates offer compassionate rhetoric but voters should say: "Show me the money. What will you cut? What programs will you expand?" I like the answers Kucinich is providing: His exit strategy from Iraq that begins with the United Nations taking temporary authority over oil revenues and rebuilding contracts. His trade policy that requires labor and environmental standards to be part of all agreements.
His proposal for streamlined, nonprofit national health insurance. And more.
Dennis Kucinich would make an exceptional president.
Ben Cohen is the co-founder of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream.
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