Afghanistan and Taxes

For from the least to the greatest of them,
everyone is greedy for unjust gain;
and from prophet to priest,
everyone deals falsely.
-- Jermiah

Don't led it be said DC is completely devoid of truth, or that it cannot produce the occasional good idea. Case and point, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan states any troop increase in Afghanistan should be paid for with a tax increase. Now, there's not a good idea, but an essential one. Levin calls for a tax increase on the wealthiest and that's fine. The destruction of a progressive tax system over the last three decades has been the cause of tremendous mischief and misery. However, I disagree this particular tax should be unevenly divided, it needs to be shared by us all.

There is no greater decision for any democratic society than going to war and its burdens need to be shared by all. Of course America's misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq have been anything but shared. The actual burden of fighting, that of life and limb, has been placed on an extremely small minority of the population and in the best of Wall Street accounting, much of the war's cost has been placed off the books. Conservative costs, such as they can be counted, amount to a trillion dollars to date. That's enough to plug every hole in every state and local government budget thrice over.

There's no greater argument against allowing DC to simply keep spending money than America's obscene military budget. At this point without some control of the budget, we have no control over the military. Wealth generation through conquest is much older than industrial economics, and in that traditional sense, the opening of Iraq's oil fields to "Big Oil" will return some dividends. However the costs are quite high for a nation that is now running our military on borrowed money. As Paul Kennedy showed in "The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, conquest needs return on investment. When empires get to the point they are going in ever increasing debt to pay for their military exploits it is soon unsustainable.

This is pre-industrial economics lesson for all those who say deficits do not matter. At some point they do. When? Well again the only answer to that is when they do. Our debt literally papers over the vast structural imbalances in the American economy and to keep simply pouring more money into these imbalances is insanity. So, as DC pushes for more troops to Afghanistan, it needs to be paid for by all of us. I suggest a $2 tax on gasoline.

Come Home America.