There is only one political force in America strong enough to break the Military Industrial Complex stranglehold on federal budgeting. It isn’t the Democrats and it isn’t the Republicans. It’s the U.S. taxpayer. Taxpayer sanity can cut the Pentagon down to size. Here is how it can work.

A “Truth in Federal Spending Act” Let’s call it the “Truth in Federal Spending Act of 2007.” It mandates three revolutionary steps:

First, it requires the administration to inform every single taxpayer--personally—as to what was done with his or her money last year. Exactly how was discretionary spending allocated?

Second, it invites every single taxpayer to re-allocate that spending according to his or her priorities.

Third, it requires that the White House report to Congress the collective results of this national exercise in priority shifting.

Shock and Awe at Pentagon Profligacy In peacetime, in wartime, in bogus-wartime, it matters not a whit—the Pentagon greedily consumes at least half of all discretionary spending. How do Americans react when they are confronted with this fact? They are quite simply appalled. We know this because of some brilliant polling conducted by Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, Ben Cohen’s organization of pragmatic progressives. The BLSP polls were conducted twice—once in 2000, once again last year. Both polls show similar results.

Massive Liposuction of Pentagon Fat The polls show that if it were up to the America People, a vast majority of us would slash an average of $78 billion a year from the Pentagon budget. We would reallocate those billions to schools, to job training, to medical research, to diplomacy, to cleaning up our air and water. For any cynic these polls are a bracing corrective. They reveal an extremely sane electorate. The Truth in Federal Spending Act, in effect, institutionalizes the polls, and thrusts them in the face of Congress.

The Pie Chart from Hell One last question. How do we get this liberating exercise into the hands of every taxpayer? That’s easy. Every winter the IRS mails its annual guide to a hundred-million-plus taxpayers. On the cover page of that mailing we mandate a pie chart showing discretionary spending from the previous fiscal year. (That’s the pie chart from hell— huge Pentagon slice, everybody else fighting over crumbs.) On page 3 we put another pie—same size, but blank. We ask the taxpayer to re-slice it his or her way, and send it along with his tax return. We can even entice him to do so, with a $2 credit check-off.