This is unreal! Check out Pro Skater Omar Salazar own the hills/streets/sidewalks of San Francisco… amazing!

Black Friday is such an interesting day of the year. It’s become almost a patriotic sort of holiday in the middle of this Great Recession we have placed ourselves in. “Buy to help the economy!” However, there seems to be more and more of a growing sense that we shouldn’t succumb to the materialistic endeavor of Black Friday and instead boycott the day altogether… Black Friday has become Buy Nothing Day.

However, what if that’s not really the answer? For many who participate in Buy Nothing Day, the purchases that would be made on Black Friday simply get strung out over the course of the month leading up to Christmas which makes Buy Nothing Day a purely symbolic act with no real teeth at all.

What if we began to think about Black Friday in a different way… what if we began to look at how we spend our money–where we spend our money? What if we began to educate ourselves on our spending habits…

(ht: Adam Lehman

Often times our buying power, our wealth as a nation is seen by many as a very bad thing… I believe that’s because of how we use our buying power. But what if we began to see our buying power as a positive thing… what if we began utilizing our financial resources and buying power in positive ways by educating ourselves on what it is that we are buying and where it is that we are buying from? I think we would see radical changes take place in business practices all over the globe, and through our buying choices be a voice for the voiceless.

Just a few facts…

In 2009 the Pentagon’s base military budget was $518 billion + an extra $130 billion for Iraq & Afghanistan = $648 billion for 2009 alone.

Earlier this month President Obama signed the Military Defense Authorization bill for 2010 raising the Pentagon’s base military budget to $550 billion + another $130 billion for Iraq & Afghanistan = $680 billion for 2010.

(If you’re keeping tally, that’s $1.3 trillion in defense spending for a two year time span.)

The United States has consistently ranked #1 in military expenditures and 2009 is no different… we will outspend the next 15 countries combined. Meaning, if you take the military expenditures of China, Russia, Britain, France, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, India, Brazil, Italy, Australia, Canada, Indonesia, and The Netherlands and put them all together, we spent more. (An interesting note: 12 of the 15 countries in that list are our allies.) In fact, the United States accounts for 47% of the entire world’s military spending… and if you’re worried about North Korea or Iran, well, we outspent them at a pace of 72 to 1. And just for some perspective: China (ranked number 2 on the list) spent only $89.4 billion on their military… or 5.8% of the world military spending.

Sound like overkill?

In 2008, 21% of every dollar paid in taxes went to the defense budget. (That number is sure to rise as the 2009 budget gets reconciled and all the numbers come in.) Meaning if your family makes $60,000/year this is what your portion looks like…

(ht: Rortybomb)

I’ve long found the excessive amount of money we spend as a nation on military expenditures ridiculous, especially considering how poorly we take care of our soldiers (the majority of the money goes to outdated weapons technology that has been earmarked by members of congress for their home state.) But it became a lot more real for me as this past week the Senate unveiled their own version of the Health Care Bill. There has already been a great deal of debate surrounding the bill, and it certainly won’t come to a conclusion in the near future. (Note: The point of this post is not to talk about the merits or lack of merit with the current Health Care Bill because it’s got a long way to go and in the end will look nothing like what it does in its present state… if it passes at all. Rather it’s to look at the discrepancy of our values as a country in how we spend our money.) The greatest amount of argumentation about the Health Care Bill came as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) unveiled the cost of the bill in its current form: $848 billion over the course of ten years, or roughly $84.8 billion per year (or 12.5% of what we currently spend on our national defense–not our overall budget.)

The screams from fiscal conservatives could be heard all across the country subsequently leading to a quick “no” on health care because of the cost alone in an attempt to quickly stifle debate. However, I’m sure we could squeeze $84.8 billion dollars per year out of the Pentagon’s budget to provide health care for those who cannot afford to pay for health care on their own because of rising premiums (or roughly the equivalent of China’s defense budget…and we’d still be okay on national defense still ranking far and away as #1 in the world with.) That’s $84.8 billion to protect American’s from sickness and disease… $84.8 billion to save lives instead of $84.8 billion to take lives.

When the $680 billion dollar Military Defense Authorization Bill came across the President’s desk, there was hardly a peep on the astronomical cost… it’s nearly 10x greater than the cost of health care… where were the fiscal conservatives on that one? As a country that purportedly stands proud in our value for life, we’ve certainly got a funny way of showing it.