This is why I voted against all this advertising – is this worth $10,000?

Info I got from very helpful staff!

The Wisconsin National Guard is spending a total of $6,250 on advertising in January, February and March, 2012. This advertising includes 100 interior bus ads, a logo on transfers cards and a ½ page ad in the Ride Guide. They are also putting back exterior ads on four buses starting this week for one year. They spent an additional $3,900 on these for a total of $10,150.

I think if they do the same for the next three quarters that would make it $38,800 for the year. Are the lives of our children in Madison worth this money to us? And just think about how much they must be spending on this nationwide. I’d rather see $38,800 go towards so many other things. What a waste of our taxpayer dollars.

Here’s a few other comments from the person who noticed the new advertising.

Ads on buses disproportionately target poor people and people of color.

It’s still the poverty draft: Military recruiting does not target young people equally, but focuses on disadvantaged groups.

As citizens we cannot get our government to adequately fund schools and employment programs, but the military recruiters always seem to have resources for more ads and more fancy recruiting approaches.

As taxpayers, we all pay for the very large military recruiting budget.

Local governments and schools should not have to accept placement of military recruiting ads in our public spaces.

About 10,000 Wisconsin National Guard troops have been deployed to combat zones during the last decade.

Deployments to war zones continue: In September we learned that another 180 troops from Milwaukee, Oconomowoc and West Bend were being deployed to Kosovo. And, just before the holidays, another 130 National Guard soldiers from an Oshkosh-based company were told that they will be deployed to Kuwait in early 2012.

According to Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, 2,700 Wisconsinites under age 25 entered active military duty last year. And the state’s Department of Public Instruction reports that 3.2 percent of high school graduates in Wisconsin said they planned to enlist in the military.

According to the Wisconsin Center on Investigative Journalism (WCIJ), 731 Wisconsin service members have been wounded and 121 have been killed so far in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. [I think at least 100 of those were from the WI National Guard.]

The U.S. economy continues to be weighed down by the costs of 1,000 military bases in foreign countries, and 350,000 U.S. troops deployed there. Not to mention the cost of all that expensive military hardware.

The U.S. is on track to spend $112 billion dollars on Afghanistan this year alone.

The legality of the long-term nationalization of the National Guard is under some question by Constitutional scholars and lawyers.

Schools and local governments are bearing large funding cuts from federal and state sources. This makes them more desperate for funds, which may be feeding their increasing receptivity to military recruiting ads.

Young people cannot get out of their legal commitment to the military for about 8 years — that’s totally unlike any other “job.” They also are subject to military justice and other degredations of their civil rights while serving.

A large amount of tax money from this area has left over the past 10 years (and before!) to fight wars of aggression in faraway places that do not make most of us more secure or better off.

Many military recruiters have resorted to lying and disreputable tactics to convince young people to sign up.

$38,000 – It’s not worth it. Not at all.