More on taxes for war
About a week ago, a small group of Democrats came up with a proposal to create a small surtax to pay for the Republicans War in Iraq. The Democratic leadership ran away from the proposal almost as soon as it was announced, apparently preferring to simply give Bush everything he asks for while also continuing the Republican Congress' record for fiscal irresponsibility, rather than be faced with the Republicans blaming them for raising taxes. I thought that would be the last of it, but this weekend there were a few stories about the proposal that made for entertaining reading.
First, from E. J. Dionne, Jr.
Would conservatives and Republicans support the war in Iraq if they had to pay for it?
That is the immensely useful question that Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, put on the table this week by calling for a temporary war tax to cover President Bush's request for $145 billion in supplemental spending for Iraq.
The proposal is a magnificent way to test the seriousness of those who claim that the Iraq war is an essential part of the "global war on terror." If the war's backers believe in it so much, it should be easy for them to ask taxpayers to put up the money for such an important endeavor.
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That's an aggressive way to frame any such antitax "no" votes, but it's also accurate. If a war appropriations bill with a tax included went down to overwhelming defeat, wouldn't that tell us something about the depth of commitment to this war?
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Here is a president who signed one bloated spending bill after another -- as long as they were passed by a Republican Congress -- posing as a fiscal conservative now that Democrats are in the majority. He's so tough and determined that he's also drawn the line on . . . children's health care.
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And if the president believes in this war so much and doesn't want to raise taxes, let him propose the deep spending cuts it would take to cover the costs. Then Bush would show how much of a priority he believes this war is -- and he wouldn't be playing small ball.
The next column is by Thomas Friedman, who is, as David Brin put it, "one of the brightest but also most erratic and infuriating of pundits". Often derided for his contention that the Iraq War will work itself out in a certain timeframe that now carries his name, he is still capable of decent analysis and prose.
Every so often a quote comes out of the Bush administration that leaves you asking: Am I crazy or are they? I had one of those moments last week when Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, was asked about a proposal by some Congressional Democrats to levy a surtax to pay for the Iraq war, and she responded, “We’ve always known that Democrats seem to revert to type, and they are willing to raise taxes on just about anything.”
Yes, those silly Democrats. They’ll raise taxes for anything, even — get this — to pay for a war!
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Friends, we are through the looking glass. It is now “fiscally irresponsible” to want to pay for a war with a tax. These democrats just don’t understand: the tooth fairy pays for wars. Of course she does — the tooth fairy leaves the money at the end of every month under Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s pillow. And what a big pillow it is! My God, what will the Democrats come up with next? Taxes to rebuild bridges or schools or high-speed rail or our lagging broadband networks? No, no, the tooth fairy covers all that. She borrows the money from China and leaves it under Paulson’s pillow.
There is one paragraph from Friedman's column that I'll have to take exception to:
Excuse me, Ms. Perino, but I wish Republicans would revert to type. I thought they were, well, conservatives — the kind of people who saved for rainy days, who invested in tomorrow for their kids, folks who didn’t believe in free lunches or free wars.
The Republicans haven't been conservatives, or at least fiscal conservatives, for quite a long time, and Friedman's colleague at the NYT wrote a column today reminding everybody that the Republicans are reverting to type.
There have been a number of articles recently that portray President Bush as someone who strayed from the path of true conservatism. Republicans, these articles say, need to return to their roots.
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For example, people claim to be shocked that Mr. Bush cut taxes while waging an expensive war. But Ronald Reagan also cut taxes while embarking on a huge military buildup.
People claim to be shocked by Mr. Bush’s general fiscal irresponsibility. But conservative intellectuals, by their own account, abandoned fiscal responsibility 30 years ago. Here’s how Irving Kristol, then the editor of The Public Interest, explained his embrace of supply-side economics in the 1970s: He had a “rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems” because “the task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority — so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.”(Emp. added)
The rest of Krugman's column is worth reading as well, but the key point for this post is that Republicans have walked away from fiscal conservatism, and as a result, fiscal conservatives are finally walking away from the Republican Party.
Of course, according to David Broder and his GOP strategist friend, the real problem here is that the Democrats are being too confrontational by coming up with proposals like this war tax. The good thing for the Democrats to do, according to the GOP strategist, is to follow Pelosi's lead by running away from such proposals and be more willing to cooperate with the Bush Administration.
Little wonder that the Democratic Congress has higher approval ratings among Republicans than their own party.
