"A billion dollars every week for Iraq, $87 billion for Iraq. We can't get $5 billion for childcare over five years in welfare reform"
About this Quote
The stark juxtaposition of numbers exposes a moral ledger as much as a fiscal one. A government willing to commit $87 billion and a billion dollars weekly to a distant war balks at $5 billion spread over five years to help parents afford childcare. The imbalance is not simply arithmetic; it is a statement about what and whom a society is prepared to protect.
The reference points to the early 2000s, when the United States launched the Iraq War and Congress approved a massive supplemental appropriation to fund military operations and reconstruction. At the same time, debates over reauthorizing welfare reform revolved around whether to modestly increase child care subsidies so low-income parents, largely single mothers, could meet work requirements without leaving children unattended or in unstable care. The $5 billion request was small by federal standards and directly tied to enabling work, family stability, and child well-being.
Jim Wallis, an evangelical public theologian and founder of Sojourners, often argues that budgets are moral documents. Here he calls out a political culture that claims pro-family values while underfunding the basic supports that make family life viable. The cadence of his numbers does its own work: repeated references to Iraq underline the singularity of national focus, the weekly metric conveys relentless burn, while the five-year horizon shows how modest and delayed the social ask really is. He reframes affordability as a myth; the issue is not capacity but priority.
The critique is not only antiwar. It is a broader indictment of policy choices that normalize extraordinary military outlays and treat investments in children as luxuries. By elevating childcare, he identifies a leverage point where relatively small public dollars yield large social returns: safer children, steadier employment, stronger communities. The implicit challenge is to align national spending with professed values, measuring strength not by what is destroyed abroad but by what is built at home for the most vulnerable.
The reference points to the early 2000s, when the United States launched the Iraq War and Congress approved a massive supplemental appropriation to fund military operations and reconstruction. At the same time, debates over reauthorizing welfare reform revolved around whether to modestly increase child care subsidies so low-income parents, largely single mothers, could meet work requirements without leaving children unattended or in unstable care. The $5 billion request was small by federal standards and directly tied to enabling work, family stability, and child well-being.
Jim Wallis, an evangelical public theologian and founder of Sojourners, often argues that budgets are moral documents. Here he calls out a political culture that claims pro-family values while underfunding the basic supports that make family life viable. The cadence of his numbers does its own work: repeated references to Iraq underline the singularity of national focus, the weekly metric conveys relentless burn, while the five-year horizon shows how modest and delayed the social ask really is. He reframes affordability as a myth; the issue is not capacity but priority.
The critique is not only antiwar. It is a broader indictment of policy choices that normalize extraordinary military outlays and treat investments in children as luxuries. By elevating childcare, he identifies a leverage point where relatively small public dollars yield large social returns: safer children, steadier employment, stronger communities. The implicit challenge is to align national spending with professed values, measuring strength not by what is destroyed abroad but by what is built at home for the most vulnerable.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|
More Quotes by Jim
Add to List
