Читать книгу War Time - Группа авторов - Страница 19

Civic militarism has now all but disappeared in the West. Large-scale wars that required large amounts of soldiers, money, and in turn bargaining with the population for resources³⁰ no longer occur, whether because the advent of nuclear weapons created prohibitively high costs of war or because the “better angels of our nature” have been able to emerge.³¹ The total number of war fatalities plunged in the second half of the twentieth century, a positive development, but with those declines came changes in the relationship between the state, its society, and the conduct of war.

The move away from borrowing has its contemporary foundations in the Korean War. While the United States actually financed 100 percent of the war’s costs with taxes, more than any other war in its history, closer inspection reveals a different story that illustrates the state’s shift from extraction.³² As long as the country felt the Korean War was like World War II, it supported extraction. Indeed, in August 1950, a Gallup survey found that 70 percent of Americans were willing to pay more taxes to finance military operations. The polling institute reported that it had “rarely … in its 15 years of measuring public opinion found such heavy majorities expressing a willingness to pay more taxes for any public purpose.”³³

Relatively quickly, however, a quite different type of conflict emerged: limited war with limited stakes, no declaration of war, and no clear strategic goals, yet indefinite commitment to the use of force in Korea. President Harry Truman’s efforts to engage in continued extraction through additional war taxes were quickly rebuffed once the reality of this limited war set in. Public support for either a war tax or indeed the war itself crumbled, and one member of Congress noted that “barring a war,” any revenue proposals “will be very coldly received.… I am more convinced than ever that we have imposed all of the additional individual and corporate taxes our economy should bear.”³⁴ However, Truman had studiously avoided calling the conflict a war, and therefore withdrew the proposals for war taxes from further consideration.

A similar problem occurred with regard to Vietnam, but this time President Lyndon Johnson had internalized the lessons of the recent past. Adlai Stevenson, not Harry Truman, had been the Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 because the Korean War had resulted in stalemate and taxes had tainted Truman’s re-election prospects. Johnson therefore eschewed the prospect of taxes for as long as he could, aiming to avoid the trappings of war that might draw scrutiny to his Great Society programs. He engaged in gradual escalation rather than all-out mobilization. By 1966 the country had 300,000 troops in the country without technically being on a war footing, thereby avoiding the war taxes that would attract scrutiny of the conflict. Johnson admitted: “I don’t know much about economics, but I do know Congress. And I can get the Great Society through right now—this is a golden time. We’ve got a good Congress and I’m the right President and I can do it. But if I talk about the cost of the war, the Great Society won’t go through.”³⁵

Johnson’s reluctance to impose a war tax was warranted. The public was decidedly opposed to such a tax, in large part because it did not have a sense of any existential stakes. The policy of gradual escalation and the blurred line between war and peace had muddled the terms of the debate. In May 1967 almost as many Americans (48 percent) said they did not have a “clear idea” what the war was about as those who did (49 percent). Only a minority (41 percent) thought that the war in Vietnam “may prevent World War III.”³⁶ The public never felt about Vietnam as it had about World War II, when there were real concerns about Germany “ruling the world” and Japan “ruling Asia,” as Gallup polls put it at that time. No Gallup poll over Vietnam ever probed whether the public expected the war to bring freedom to the Asian continent or result in a dramatic setback for communism.³⁷ In short, even if support for the conflict started at reasonably high levels, there was never any sense of the high existential stakes associated with World War II.

Thus introducing a war tax would be risky. Insofar as it would take the form of legislation, Congress would have to engage in debate, which would call into question the need for resources, which would be reported in the newspapers and alert the public, which could then push back. Johnson invoked his legislative adversary, House Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee Wilbur Mills, who favored a balanced budget to be achieved through spending cuts rather than tax increases. The president emphasized the implications for his prized social programs: “Old Wilbur Mills will sit down there and he’ll thank me kindly and send me back my Great Society, and then he’ll tell me that they’ll be glad to spend whatever we need for the war.”³⁸ Thus, despite the urging of Johnson’s economic advisers, he resisted meaningful war taxes until the 10 percent surcharge in 1968. The case for Johnson’s failure was overdetermined, but it is clear that war taxes were an important issue that coalesced and crystalized opposition to the war, alongside the questionable progress and growing casualty figures. The 1968 surcharge was the last time that an American president would institute a war tax, and for good reason politically.

Developments since the Korean War and Vietnam War confirm that, contrary to Hanson’s assertion above that the connection between citizens and war in a republic is a consistent feature across time, there has been a distinct decline in civic militarism. The public has an antipathy toward total war, and its growing sensitivity to casualties and costs has meant that leaders themselves shy away from soliciting those sacrifices in blood and treasure. Inevitably this limits the type of wars that countries in the West are able to fight. They keep conflicts at the level of “police action,” as in the Korean War, or engage in “gradual escalation” to avoid political debate about war. Yet as long as they cannot significantly escalate these wars—because they lack both the extractive resources of earlier periods and domestic political will—they are also unable to achieve relatively rapid and decisive victories.

Emblematic of the shift away from extraction and civic militarism—and pointing to the consequences of that shift—is the effort of legislators to impose a war tax for the Afghanistan surge in late 2009, as the war entered its ninth year and became one of the longest and costliest wars in American history. The proposed legislation would have charged a surtax on individual incomes. As its legislative sponsors, Representatives David Obey (D-WI), John Murtha (D-PA), and John Larson (D-CT) argued, “the only people who’ve paid any price for our military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan are our military families … we believe if this war is to be fought, it’s only fair that everyone share the burden. That’s why we are offering legislation to impose a surtax.”³⁹ Obey explained that “we’re just trying to keep in the forefront what the financial costs are,” while Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) added that “it’s important for people to understand how these wars are adding to our deficits.”⁴⁰

In response to this proposal, lawmakers on both sides of the House voiced their opposition, ostensibly on the grounds that they were protecting constituents. As Representative Jerry Lewis (R-CA) suggested, Americans were “already being taxed to death.”⁴¹ Democrats other than the legislative sponsors were scarcely more supportive, hoping to avoid what they implied was a politically toxic proposal.⁴² Facing such bipartisan opposition, the proposal languished despite scant direct evidence that constituents held the views that their representatives attributed to them. Moreover, debate about a war tax was so perfunctory that questions regarding that potential opposition went unexamined. What is interesting here is that, whereas previous warfare had strongly affected civilian populaces at home, governments now seek to shield civilians almost entirely from its impacts.

In both the most recent wars, Afghanistan and Iraq, the prospect of war taxes has been concentrated largely in anti-war coalitions on the left but shunned by the mainstream of both parties. The most recent proposal for a war tax came from former Democratic presidential contender Beto O’Rourke, seeking to differentiate himself in a crowded primary field. His proposal would have had households with incomes greater than $200,000 pay $1,000 a year, while those with less than $3,000 would pay $25, with the revenues going toward veterans’ health care. The subtext of the proposal was distinctly antiwar: if individuals understood the cost of wars, maybe they would turn against them. Yet the very feature that would give the war tax teeth—visibility—is exactly what makes it antipathetic to political elites and therefore unlikely. However, even the occasion for discussion about wars—how we pay for them and their unending nature—appeared to be a departure from the recent past. After all, doing nothing about the policy is tantamount to doing something, by allowing the absence of opposition to enable ongoing conflict.

The lessons from recent wars are instructive. The publics of Western democracies rarely pay directly for the cost of war in the form of war taxes that in the past became lightning rods for political engagement with elected officials and their policies. Fareed Zakaria’s notion of “illiberal democracy” is useful here:⁴³ state actors in the West (policymakers, bureaucrats, and leaders) can make use of debt financing to be free from close civilian scrutiny. Zakaria’s phrase was actually targeting non-Western democracies, but some aspects of that label at least may be increasingly applicable to established Western democracies. Wars since 9/11 have expanded temporally and geographically with little accountability; they do so in part because perpetuation and expansion incur few political costs.

Yet legislators now seem even more wary than they were over seventy-five years ago to tax Americans to pay for the fight. The same policy that would create a more equitable and financially sound form of finance would also invite political scrutiny. The state is at a stage now where it is paradoxically both strong and weak: technological advances have made war financing hurdles a thing of the past; yet galvanizing the public to achieve the potential for large-scale extraction is risky and attempts are muted. If the primary goal of Congress is reelection, then demurring from periodic proposals for a war tax is no doubt wise. If the goal is good public policy, however, then the visibility of taxes, despite the unwelcome controversy it invites, will operate fruitfully in the service of democratic accountability.