The next Republican President cutting a tax expressly dedicated to the military - yes, that would indeed be fun to watch.
The next Republican President cutting a tax expressly dedicated to the military - yes, that would indeed be fun to watch.
I notice for some reason in all of the hatred of Republicans for public healthcare, they never seem to go after TriCare. I wonder why that is?
Menzo
3297
Yes, the current Republican party, scions of morality and truthfullness, with their senses of irony intact.
Or no, is this the Republican party with absolutely no sense of shame, the Republican party that won’t even fund 9/11 first responders? The ones that suggest tax cuts pay for themselves no matter what?
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills here. We already spend too much on the military and you’re warming to the suggestion that we add a cherry on top of this shit sundae?
I could understand it if this was part of a larger strategy. Talk about how having a huge military budget like we do doesn’t make sense since much of it needs to only be spent during times of war. Say that we’re going to reduce annual, mandatory spending down to what the fixed cost of having an appropriate military is, then say that we will institute a War Tax that will only be put in place during times of war. That means we’ll understand better the real costs, and think twice about military adventurism.
That would sound good to me.
Timex
3298
Literally the only purpose of this is to set aside money to take care of veterans, and it only takes effect if we actually declare another war.
You’re basically trying to hold that hostage in order to exact spending cuts to stuff you don’t support.
Ultimately, support what you want, but I’m not seeing this proposal as bad at all.
Menzo
3299
And there’s the other problem, since we don’t declare wars anymore anyway. So what’s the point? Pay for veterans’ care from the existing military budget. Simple.
Given that Congress has ceded war-making power to the Executive, the tax would never actually be invoked, would it? I mean, what would be the trigger? Certainly not a declaration of war, and probably not even any sort of authorization for use of force, because the White House simply wouldn’t ask for either. So we’d still have the wars, and still not have the tax.
I mean, we’ve got soldiers dying in Niger. War that invokes the tax, or not war that invokes the tax? Who knows?
(Personally, I don’t even think it’s a serious proposal. Like his ‘court-packing’ plan, it strikes me as a rhetorical device designed to make him seem reasonable, not like any policy that is actually worth a damn.)
“War” is shorthand for whatever trigger someone wants to put in; it could be “x soldiers lost to hostile activity in a year” or whatever. I’m all for military budget reduction and reallocation, but using this as something of an insurance plan also makes sense to me on top of that as long as the funds can’t be rerouted away from care (directly or indirectly).
We are still officially at war with North Korea. I doubt anyone wants to build something like this out of loophole-free cloth.
Who pays for war now? Who pays for veterans health care now?
Isn’t the answer largely middle-class taxpayers?
It’s just a gimmick. Someone thought it would sound reasonable and clever and they ran with it.
rowe33
3304
Count me in the ‘reduce military spending elsewhere and use those funds to specifically pay for veteran care’ group. It’s absurd to think we need MORE money thrown at the military when we could carve out a small piece of the existing budget to pay for this. We spend way more than anyone else already.
Sure. The notion isn’t that taxes don’t already go to this, but rather that it gives a political cost to war which politicians have been able to neatly avoid in the glom of general taxation. It’s a “gimmick” in place to penalize military adventurism.
Timex
3306
It also potentially defuses arguments of “you want to cut funding for our veterans!” any time you oppose military spending, as this would create a separate pot of money specifically for taking care of them.
But who is being penalized? The middle class, right? The ones with basically no say in decisions about who we bomb?
‘Provide more funding for war-making’ doesn’t sound like a great idea. Yes, it’s being cast as money for veterans health care, but money is fungible, and what it does is free up DoD money for war with a pretty regressive tax. Assuming it ever got invoked at all anyway, which it most often would not.
Menzo
3308
You’ve been such a forceful critic of Trump and the modern Republican Party that I sometimes forget that you are a Republican. But yeah, I think we’re just going to have to agree to disagree with the notion that we should spend more money on the military.
I don’t even get how that works. Is the tax permanent? Once you have a war, everyone pays that tax forever, even long after the war ends? And it doesn’t fund non-war-casualty veterans health care, which still has to be funded.
I suppose my gripe about these sorts of plans is, why is it that candidates for President have to be so cute?
What needs to happen is to budget adequately for veterans health care, and take the money necessary to do it from the rest of the DoD budget. So, propose that.
If we need higher taxes, propose actual higher taxes on rich people. More brackets at the high end and steeper marginal rates.
The electorate pays for it, and the majority of the electorate is middle class, yes. This in turn leads to stories about elected officials directly taking money out of our pockets to fund wars. The response of the electorate in turn penalizes this behavior. The tax as outlined (and I assume this was a rough draft) itself is somewhat progressive, so if you were making:
$25,000 — tax is .001% of your income. Working 40 hours/week, that’s 2 hours/year.
$35,000 — tax is .0016% of your income
$45,000 — tax is .0022% of your income
$62,500 — tax is .0026% of your income
$87,500 — tax is .0031% of your income
$150,000 — tax is .0032% of your income. Working 40 hours/week, that’s 6 2/3 hours/year.
$200k+ — undefined
Frankly, if this was real then it needs to keep scaling and shifting some more numbers wouldn’t be bad, but it still needs to be something everyone pays at least in some nominal way to make it more “real” for them. Without that, the political pressure minimizes; this isn’t just a quest for funding, but a way to correct the behavior of our politicians.
If we can convince them to go to war less, this in turn should theoretically lead to a shrinking of the defense budget.
Well, they need to stand out from the crowd while appealing to enough of the masses. That’s a hell of a tightrope act when you’re trying to manage both primary and general elections, and in addition run a county without looking like an outright liar (Trump) if they manage to somehow win.
That said, Warren has already brought up a wealth tax as one of her planks.
That’s why I said it was a gimmick, not a proposal. I get that he’s proposing it so that he will stand out.
magnet
3313
The point is to tie a tax directly to an outcome, on the theory that this will cause a reduction in the outcome. Just as carbon taxes are primarily meant to reduce carbon, this tax is meant to reduce military adventurism.
And I think it might work, though not necessarily using Beto’s proposal. The VA keeps track of service-related disability. So make a fund, say $X per service-related disability, to be used for its treatment.
The fund would be paid by a special tax that appears on your paycheck, just like FICA appears as a tax meant to pay for SS. Ideally the tax would be more progressive than FICA.
But when you look at your paycheck and see that $50 was taken out to treat service-related disability, but only $40 last year, you might ask yourself “Why am I paying more for service-related disability?!” Then hopefully you would remember that yet another conflict just started, and respond accordingly.
Then call for a transparent tax increase in the event of any war, separately from any need to fund health care for veterans. If it is a disincentive for war, make it that. Don’t try to sell it as a funding mechanism for veterans benefits.
