The War Surtax

Everybody has been assuming since Sunday that tonight – Tuesday 1 December - the president is going to announce a significant increase in troops to be sent to Afghanistan. See my November post "Re-Run" for how I feel about that assumption which is apparently about to become fact. But life moves on.

Moving on, therefore, I am curious about something.

I heard just a few moments ago on NPR's "Morning Edition" that the number of troops to be sent is thought to be going to be about thirty thousand. It is also thought that the cost will be about thirty billion a year. Apparently all those Goldman Sachs' bonuses have cut into the Federal budget so much that even thirty billion seems like a lot of money. Various among our elected representatives even have been heard in public utterances occurring during breaks from their meetings with their various lobbyist sponsors that they are not at all sure that we can pay for thirty thousand additional troops in Afghanistan.

So they are suggesting that we probably will need to impose a one percent income tax surtax to pay for the endeavor. The last time we had one of those was to help pay for the iteratively incremental inflow of troops into Vietnam. And that worked out well.

One of the advantages, those lawmakers are pointing out, to such a surtax is that it would make all of us feel more of a sense of ownership of the action in Afghanistan. We need to pay for all the war we are getting they assert.

In a previous post, "Potpourri", I discuss the current persistent use of the debating error "begging the question" in most current discussion of various important issues. The assertion, above, that we need to pay for what we are getting is yet another example of this phenomenon. It is elliptical – the proof being offered that is in itself unproved – is not stated ("you all want to fight a war in Afghanistan") but it is there nonetheless. And it "proves" that we need to pay.

So where do we have any evidence that we all want to fight a war in Afghanistan? Where does it say that we all want to go through the motions again of thrashing around for some currently un-determined number of years and then declare victory, get out and watch whoever it was that we thought we were fighting take over after we leave?

One percent of my annual income tax bill is not a life threatening amount of money, but I have no interest paying it for fighting a war in Afghanistan. So can I send my surtax to Goldman Sachs?