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The Receipt We Never Read

Our Taxes, Their Children, and the Future of One Human Species

By Vincent Dean Cordova, Jr. — Cordova 2028: Moving Forward Together

Poster: The Receipt We Never Read. A hand holds a torn receipt over a W-2 form, titled Where Your Federal Income Taxes Went: War and Weapons $4,049, highlighted in red; Pentagon Contractors $1,870; School Lunches and Nutrition $124; Home Heating and Energy Aid $16. Behind it, the U.S. Capitol, a fighter jet and black smoke rise over ruined buildings, while a young child in a keffiyeh, with a scratched and dusty cheek, holds a worn stuffed rabbit and looks up at the sky.
Campaign design team

This morning I couldn't shake one thought.

Every one of us who works, who gets a paycheck, who files every April, is part of something we never voted on line by line. We hand over a share of our labor, and that labor gets turned into things. Some of those things are roads, school lunches, and medicine. And some of those things are bombs that land on families sleeping in tents.

We don't see it. There's no receipt stapled to our W-2 that says this portion of your week paid for the munition that killed a child you will never meet. But the money moves anyway. And because it moves in our name, it is our responsibility.

I'm not writing this to make anyone feel guilty. Guilt is cheap and it changes nothing. I'm writing this because we are the most capable generation of human beings that has ever lived, and we are still financing the destruction of our own kind. We have the comprehension to know better. Yet here we are.

Line 1

The Money Is Not Abstract

Let's start with what we actually paid.

The National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies publishes a tax receipt every year that breaks down where the average American's federal income taxes go. For 2025, the average taxpayer put about $4,049 toward war and weapons. Roughly $1,870 of that went straight to Pentagon contractors — about fifteen times the $124 that same taxpayer paid for school lunches and other nutrition programs. Home heating and energy assistance for the whole year? About $16.

Where Your Federal Income Taxes Went

Average taxpayer · 2025 · selected lines, bars to scale

  • War and Weapons$4,049
  • of that, Pentagon Contractors$1,870
  • School Lunches & Nutrition$124
  • Home Heating & Energy Aid$16

Source: National Priorities Project, 2025 Tax Receipt

Read that again. Sixteen dollars to keep our neighbors warm. Nearly two thousand dollars to the companies that build the weapons.

And it is climbing. The administration's FY2027 request reaches $1.5 trillion for national defense when you count the discretionary request plus reconciliation money, and the discretionary defense request alone would take up roughly 63% of all discretionary spending — up from about half in recent years. Meanwhile, nondefense programs — the parts of government that feed, house, heal, and teach people — are being cut.

Defense share of discretionary spending

$1.5 trillion

Recent yearsabout half
FY2027 request63%

Source: CSIS. The $1.5 trillion is the $1.15 trillion discretionary request plus $350 billion in reconciliation.

That isn't a budget. That's a statement of values. And right now the statement says our country values the capacity to kill more than it values the capacity to live.

Line 2

Where the Weapons Went

Since October 7, 2023, the United States has provided at least $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel, according to Brown University's Costs of War Project and the Quincy Institute. When you add U.S. military operations across the region tied to that war — Yemen, Iran, and beyond — the total cost to American taxpayers is estimated at $31 billion to nearly $34 billion and counting. Researchers also note that U.S. weapons make up most of Israel's arms imports, about 68% from 2021 to 2025. A senior Israeli air force official has said Israel would have a hard time sustaining the Gaza campaign for more than a few months without American supply.

Billed to American taxpayers

U.S. military aid to Israel$21.7B
U.S. operations in Yemen, Iran and the region$9.65–12.07B
Total$31–34B

October 2023 to September 2025. Costs of War

That's not foreign policy happening somewhere else. That's our money, delivered as our weapons, used in a war we were told was about security.

Here is what that war has looked like on the ground:

  • 73,600+

    Gaza's Health Ministry reports more than 73,600 Palestinians killed and over 174,000 wounded as of September 2026. Several independent studies suggest the true violent death toll may be near or above 100,000.

  • 21,000+58,000+

    The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reports more than 21,000 children killed between October 2023 and April 2026, and more than 58,000 children who have lost a parent.

  • 300 in 300

    Even after the October 2025 ceasefire, UNICEF documented roughly 300 more children killed in the 300 days that followed — about one child every single day during a period that was supposed to protect them.

    Update · October 2026

    By October 16, 2026, UNICEF said more than 340 children had been reported killed since the ceasefire, and hundreds more injured (UN).

Those are not numbers. Those are first steps that never got taken. First words. Graduations. Grandchildren. Those are entire family lines erased from the human story.

Line 3

What the World Has Found

I choose my words carefully because words matter. So here is where the record stands.

In September 2025, the independent UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, chaired by former UN human rights chief and former international judge Navi Pillay, concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. The commission found four of the five acts defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention — including killing members of the group and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy it — and found that senior Israeli officials had incited those acts. It called on every nation to stop transferring weapons that could contribute to it. Weeks earlier, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution reaching the same conclusion.

At the International Court of Justice, South Africa's case under the Genocide Convention is still moving. In January 2024 the court found that Palestinians' rights under the Genocide Convention were plausibly at risk, enough to order provisional measures, including preventing incitement and enabling humanitarian aid. The final ruling is years away — the court's latest schedule runs into 2029. Israel rejects the genocide findings and calls the commission biased.

  1. Jan. 26, 2024

    International Court of Justice

    Orders provisional measures in South Africa v. Israel. Source

  2. Aug. 31, 2025

    International Association of Genocide Scholars

    Passes its resolution on Gaza. Source

  3. Sept. 16, 2025

    UN Commission of Inquiry

    Publishes its genocide finding, chaired by Navi Pillay. Source

  4. May 21, 2026

    International Court of Justice

    Sets the schedule: South Africa’s Reply by Nov. 22, 2027, Israel’s Rejoinder by May 22, 2029. Source

So I'll say it plainly: I am not waiting until 2029 for a court to give me permission to see what is in front of me.

When the world's most serious investigators, genocide scholars, and children's agencies are all telling us the same thing, the moral obligation begins now — not after the paperwork is filed.

And here's the part nobody in Washington wants to say out loud: the Genocide Convention doesn't only prohibit genocide. It also makes complicity in genocide punishable. Our own laws already say we cannot send weapons to units that commit gross violations of human rights, and cannot give military aid to governments that block U.S.-supported humanitarian aid. The law is already written. What's missing is the courage to enforce it.

Line 4

One Species. One Family. One Future.

This is where I need people to step back from politics and look at biology.

Every human being on this planet shares about 99.9% of the same DNA. There is no separate species called "them." The child in Gaza, the child in Manteca, the child in Tel Aviv, the child in Sudan — same blood, same lungs, same capacity for joy and fear. Same species.

99.9%

Of the same DNA

The child in

Gaza

The child in

Manteca

The child in

Tel Aviv

The child in

Sudan

Same species.

Every living thing that has survived on this planet has done so by protecting the continuation of its kind. Wolves protect the pups. Elephants circle the young. Trees in a forest share nutrients through their roots with saplings that aren't even theirs. Nature figured out a long time ago that a species that destroys its own young is a species that is ending itself.

We are the only species with the comprehension to understand that — to study genetics, to map the genome, to know that every child is the future carrier of everything humanity is and could become. And we are also the only species that writes budgets to fund killing its own children by the tens of thousands.

When we kill children, we are not just ending lives. We are cutting off generations. We are deleting doctors who would have cured diseases, builders who would have built cities, artists, teachers, parents. We are holding back our own species.

That is the deepest failure a civilization can commit. Not because a rulebook says so, but because it goes against the most basic law of life itself: protect the next generation.

Line 5

Don't Let Stratification Be the Reason You Fail Humanity

So why does it keep happening?

Because we've been trained to rank human beings. By nation. By religion. By race. By income. By which side of a wall someone was born on. That ranking — that stratification — is the machinery that makes it possible to look at a dead child and feel nothing. It tells us some lives are "collateral" and others are "precious." It tells us some suffering is news and other suffering is noise.

And stratification is profitable. It keeps the contracts flowing. It keeps one class of people safe at the top while everyone else pays the bill — in dollars here, and in blood over there. The same system that hands $1,870 of your taxes to weapons contractors and $16 to heating assistance is the system that teaches you not to ask why.

I'm asking. And I'm asking you to ask.

You are not just a taxpayer. You are a citizen of a republic, and in a republic, the government's actions are our actions. We don't get to opt out of responsibility simply because we didn't pull the trigger. Our money bought the trigger. Our silence keeps the supply line open.

So be mindful of what else our tax dollars are doing. Not only where they fall as bombs, but anywhere they are being used to hold back any group of people, here at home or abroad. Moving forward requires all of us. Not some of us. All of us.

Don't let stratification be the reason you fail humanity.

Line 6

A Question for Those Who Pray

I want to speak directly to people of faith — Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and every tradition that believes in a Creator.

When you kneel and pray to your higher power tonight, I want you to hold one truth in your heart: the same Creator you pray to also created the people your tax dollars are killing.

He formed that child in Gaza the same way He formed yours. He knew that mother by name. He counted the hairs on that father's head. Every tradition I know teaches that life is sacred because it comes from God, not from governments, not from defense contractors, not from politicians.

So ask Him honestly: What would You tell me about this?

I don't believe He would say, "Well done, you paid your taxes on time." I believe He would ask what you did when you knew. I believe He would ask why the children He created were treated as acceptable losses. I believe every prophet, every scripture that speaks of justice for the widow and the orphan, is asking the same question right now.

You don't have to agree with me on politics. But you do have to answer to your own faith. And faith that stays silent while children die is not the faith any of our traditions describe.

Line 7

What We Will Do

Words without action are just another form of looking away. Here is what a Cordova administration commits to:

  1. 1.

    Enforce the laws already on the books. The Leahy Laws, the Foreign Assistance Act, the Arms Export Control Act, and our obligations under the Genocide Convention will be applied to every recipient of U.S. weapons — ally or not. No exceptions written in a back room.

  2. 2.

    No American weapons for atrocities. Any government found by credible international investigation to be committing genocide, war crimes, or the deliberate starvation of civilians will not receive U.S. arms or military financing while those findings stand.

  3. 3.

    A real tax receipt for every American. Every taxpayer will receive a clear, line-by-line accounting of where their federal taxes went — including military aid and arms transfers by country. If it’s done in our name, we have a right to see it.

  4. 4.

    Accountability for enablers. Consistent with our No Safe Harbor commitments, those who plan, supply, finance, or knowingly facilitate atrocity crimes will be investigated. Complicity is not a gray area.

  5. 5.

    Reinvest in life. Money pulled back from war machinery will go toward what actually protects the continuation of our species: children’s health, nutrition, housing, education, and humanitarian relief here and abroad.

Done in our name

Line 8

The Choice in Front of Us

We are living in a moment where people around the world are waking up and seeing reality in color. They see the receipts now. They see the children. They see the contracts. They see who profits and who pays.

We can keep pretending our taxes are neutral. Or we can accept that they are a moral instrument — and start using them like one.

I choose the second. I choose the next generation. I choose the child I'll never meet, because that child is part of the same human family I am.

I am a piece of the collective essence of this world that never gives up and needs every other piece to be whole.

— Vinnie Cordova

Cordova 2028: Moving Forward Together

cordova2028.com

Sources

The Blood on Your Receipt →

Why your tax dollar is a spiritual emergency.

Do They See One Species? →

On Marco Rubio, the presidency, and the question we never ask the people who want power.

Declaring Our Stance on Gaza →

Why silence equals complicity.

Vincent Cordova · Candidate for U.S. President 2028

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