• Listen to this segment

• Listen to the entire program

Americans are rushing to file their taxes by the midnight deadline on Monday while the political divide over how to best spend their precious tax dollars deepens. However a bi-partisan group of members of Congress are uniting today to demand cuts to one budget area that made it through the recent budget battles relatively unscathed – war spending. To make their point the members of Congress teamed up with Veterans for Rethinking Afghanistan and ReThink Afghanistan, the organizers of the War IOU campaign. ReThink Afghnistan has made it possible for individuals to calculate their estimated tax contribution to the Afghanistan war and send that total to their member of congress with the demand to give it back. The group of elected officials gathering today will be armed with these War IOUs as proof that their constituents support an end to the war. Using figures provided by the National Priorities Project, ReThink Afghanistan’s War IOU calculator finds that a tax payer filing as single, with a 2010 income of $33,000, will pay $1,242 in taxes toward war.

GUESTS: Arizona Democratic Congressman Raul Grijalva, Jake Diliberto an Afghanistan Veteran and member of Veterans ReThinking Afghanistan

Calculate how much of your taxes went toward war and send it to your member of Congress here: http://rethinkafghanistan.com/iou/