Better late than never.
It’s time to start thinking about how to pay not only for core spending by the Defense Department for what I will call “peacetime” forces, but also the costs for actual fighting, next year and beyond.
Bush administration officials took the core Defense budget to provide a force to fight two overseas wars and grew it from $391.5 billion in 2001 to $544.6 billion in 2009. Each year, they sought supplemental billions in addition to the growing core budget. By 2009, funds for Iraq and Afghanistan fighting had totaled $1 trillion. Over the same time period, another $1 trillion had been added to core budget spending.
For the first time in U.S. history, an American president did not ask citizens to pay a special tax to cover costs of the fighting, leaving the trillion-dollar bill for later generations. Making it worse for the economy, President George W. Bush reduced income and other taxes, including one on phone calls, which helped pay for the costs of World War II and the Korean War.
The Obama administration, sadly, has also not sought a special war tax. In 2009, Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) and others in the House called for one. It would have established a 1 percent surtax on what each taxpayer owed, plus an additional percentage on returns where the higher-income payer owed $22,600 or more.
Obey told the press at the time, “If we don’t address the cost of this war, we will continue shoving billions of dollars in taxes off on future generations and will devour money that could be used to rebuild our economy.”
In the Senate, Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, joined Obey in calling for an “additional income tax to the upper brackets, folks earning more than $200,000 or $250,000” to pay for a troop increase. “They have done incredibly well,” Levin said of the troops two years ago, “and I think that it’s important that we pay for it if we possibly can.”
The Democratic congressional leadership, petrified by the thought of increasing taxes — even to support the troops — failed to take action.
In April, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) took another approach, introducing a resolution that would have required Obama or a future president to find funding at the same time he or she planned to send U.S. troops into combat situations. His “Pay for War Resolution” called for budget cuts or added revenue if the costs could not be covered by the core defense budget. If it were an emergency situation, the fund requirement could be overridden by a vote of 60 senators.
Not perfect, but a start.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have required personal sacrifice from less than 1 percent of the American people — the troops that do the fighting and their families. “We have to ensure that Iraq and Afghanistan remain anomalies in American history,” Franken said in introducing his resolution. “It will ensure that Congress and American citizens must face the financial sacrifice of going to war. And it will force us to decide whether a war is worth that sacrifice.”
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