When Rep. David Obey, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, recently proposed a surtax that would pay for the Afghanistan War, the collective response from most of his colleagues on both sides of the aisle was, "Are you nuts?" Nancy Pelosi quickly put the kibosh on Obey's "Share the Sacrifice Act," and all talk of funding the war has been banished. Meanwhile, Democrats have spent untold hours debating how to finance health-care reform, all while Republicans carp about how doing so is just too darn expensive, what with our ever-climbing deficit.
We've become used to this contradiction in Washington. Wars just need to be fought; the defense budget just needs to keep growing; and we don't really care what it costs. The idea that we might ask each other to pay for war through our taxes is so ridiculous as to barely merit discussion. Domestic initiatives meant to improve Americans' lives, on the other hand, are deeply offensive to any notion of responsibility unless every penny is paid for in advance (and maybe not even then).
It wasn't always this way. In fact, prior to the last few decades, the ebb and flow of federal taxation was largely dictated by war. As this handy "History of the U.S. Tax System" from the U.S. Treasury -- funded with your taxes! -- explains, we raised taxes to pay for wars over and over again. A sampling:
To pay the debts of the Revolutionary War, Congress levied excise taxes. ... During the confrontation with France in the late 1790s, the Federal Government imposed the first direct taxes. ... To raise money for the War of 1812, Congress imposed additional excise taxes. ... When the Civil War erupted, the Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1861. ... The War Revenue Act of 1899 sought to raise funds for the Spanish-American War through ... doubled taxes on beer and tobacco. A tax was even imposed on chewing gum. ... The entry of the United States into World War I greatly increased the need for revenue and Congress responded by passing the 1916 Revenue Act. ... Even before the United States entered the Second World War, increasing defense spending and the need for monies to support the opponents of Axis aggression led to the passage in 1940 of two tax laws that increased individual and corporate taxes.
So what happened in the years since? Lots of things. For one, the federal government simply did far less during the 19th century than it does today. And since the 1960s, Republicans have driven our rhetoric about government spending and taxes. They successfully defined taxation as the taking of money from honest, hardworking Americans and giving it to undeserving, shiftless leeches (we could discuss the racial element to this argument at length).
Republicans have also managed to ensure that military spending isn't really considered spending at all, something that becomes evident whenever they start talking budgets. In a recent piece for Politico decrying President Barack Obama's fiscal stewardship, Republican Party Chair Michael Steele called for tax cuts (surprise, surprise) and suggested that we "freeze domestic discretionary spending" as a way to help the economy. Why just "domestic" spending? Because it doesn't include the military, of course. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney took to the pages of USA Today to propose "adopting limits on non-military discretionary spending and reforming our unsustainable, unfunded entitlements." In other words, we should cut funding for everything except the military. Meanwhile, we regularly hear the term "non-defense discretionary spending" used, as though defense spending weren't discretionary. And certainly, defense spending shouldn't ever be discussed except to debate whether it should be increased or increased hugely.
In case you're wondering, according to the Congressional Research Service, we've spent $683 billion in Iraq and $227 billion in Afghanistan between 2001 and the fiscal year that just ended, with another $139 billion requested for next year, for a total of over $1 trillion. Add in things like restocking equipment and caring for veterans, and the eventual costs will probably be double that. The Iraq War alone has now cost more than Vietnam did in inflation-adjusted terms. But when we consider whether to start or expand a war, the debate revolves around non-financial questions, which are presented as so consequential that it is almost absurd to allow the question of cost to weigh in our decision.
So why is it that, with 45,000 Americans dying every year from lack of health insurance, we don't say the same thing about health-care reform? Why aren't we saying, "We just have to do this, no matter what it costs"? Just as a point of comparison, if that figure is accurate, then over 350,000 Americans have died since September 11 because they were uninsured. Imagine what our foreign and defense policies would look like today if 350,000 Americans had been killed by terrorists in the last eight years. One thing we can be sure of is that we wouldn't be talking about how much measures to combat terrorism will cost us.
It's commonly said among responsible people that we as a polity have lost our sense of responsibility when it comes to spending. This is why we get things like the disaster that is California's government, where the public demands more and more services, yet it is nearly impossible to raise the taxes necessary to fund them. But that isn't really the problem on the federal level. When the debate turns to things like health care, infrastructure, and education, the green eyeshades are donned and the budget knives wielded without mercy. Yet the typical "fiscal conservative" in Washington is an enthusiastic supporter of various wars and ever-ballooning defense spending.
In 1953, the first year of his presidency, Dwight Eisenhower gave a speech in which he said the following:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. ... The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
No recent president -- nor anyone seriously aspiring to be president -- would make such a statement, and not only because of its argument that defense spending is a necessary evil at best and certainly not something to be celebrated. Today, Eisenhower's perspective would be simply incomprehensible. The schools and power plants, the hospitals and concrete pavement, the bushels of wheat and new homes -- it would not be quite accurate to say we consider putting them aside in order to pay for wars and the preparations for wars. That we will debate the cost of domestic initiatives is a given. But saying we have to sacrifice them in order to pay for the military would imply that the military is something that we actually have to pay for. And that isn't part of the conversation.
