Saturday, December 05, 2009
The good side of taxes
Bruce Bartlett, writing in Forbes, explains that taxes do more than pay government expenses, they may also shorten them by eliminating support for them.
Bush and his party, which controlled Congress from 2001 to 2006, never asked for sacrifices from anyone except those in our nation's military and their families. I think that's because the Republicans understood, implicitly, that the American people's support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has always been paper thin. Asking them to sacrifice through higher taxes, domestic spending cuts or reinstatement of the draft would surely have led to massive protests akin to those during the Vietnam era or to political defeat in 2004. George W. Bush knew well that when his father raised taxes in 1990 in part to pay for the first Gulf War, it played a major role in his 1992 electoral defeat.Who hasn't been tempted to acquire that which you can't afford by putting it on the card. Requiring payment for the Bush Wars will take all the fun out of killing other people.
If it takes the threat of a tax increase to get people to think seriously about whether it's worth continuing to fight wars far from home--wars that have only the most tenuous connection to the national interest--then it's a good idea. History shows that wars financed heavily by higher taxes, such as the Korean War and the first Gulf War, end quickly, while those financed largely by deficits, such as the Vietnam War and current Middle East conflicts, tend to drag on indefinitely.Call your Congresscritter and ask them to support Rep. David Obey, D-Wis. H.R. 4130, the "Share the Sacrifice Act of 2010."
If Americans aren't willing to follow John F. Kennedy and "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship" to fight a war, then we shouldn't be fighting it.
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