No U.S. president, from either party, has ever tried to wage a full-scale war and pass a large tax cut at the same time. It’s just never happened.
Lincoln raised taxes to pay for the Civil War. McKinley raised taxes to finance the Spanish-American War. Wilson raised the top income tax rate from 7% to 77% to afford WWI. Taxes were raised, multiple times, to help the nation pay for WWII, Korea, and Vietnam.
This was generally just common sense. Wars are expensive, and the costs are not always easy to anticipate in advance. These presidents faced a fairly simple choice: raise taxes, cut spending, or run a deficit. They all chose raising taxes.
I mention this, of course, because war will begin within a day or so. The Bush administration has been planning this attack for months, but been hesitant to make budgetary plans to pay for it. Indeed, the White House recently submitted its annual budget plan, but didn’t include a penny to pay for the war, even though they knew it was coming.
Congress, which as you know has the power of the purse, keeps asking how much this adventure is going to cost, and the White House keeps saying, “We’ll get back to you.”
Yesterday, administration officials said they’ll be asking for $90 billion. That’s $90 billion more than the budget planned for to cover the costs of the invasion, and it only covers the initial stages of the battle. It does not include the long-term costs of rebuilding and bringing some semblance of stability to Iraq after the war is done.
So Bush faces the same choice put before many of his predecessors in a time of war: raise taxes, cut spending, or run a deficit. Unlike his predecessors, he’s blazing a new trail. Bush proposes cutting taxes, increasing spending, and running the largest deficit in the history of the country.
It should surprise no one that congressional Democrats aren’t fond of this approach. Yesterday, Senate Dems asked Congress to pass a “patriotic pause” that would have delayed some of Bush’s tax cuts during the war. Republicans said no.
It may surprise some, however, that there are a growing number of Republicans in Congress who are hesitant to follow the president over the fiscal cliff.
Last week, 11 occasionally moderate House Republicans wrote to the White House to say they can’t go along with the president’s irresponsible approach.
“The war against terror and the crisis in the Gulf are of key concern to the American people,” they said. “However, meeting these challenges should not cause us to abandon our party’s commitment to fiscal responsibility…. We must pursue a budget policy that fairly limits both spending and tax reductions to those that are absolutely needed at this time.”
One of them, Rep. Jack Quinn of New York, a lifelong Republican who represents the district surrounding Buffalo, offered the “Carpetbagger Quote of the Day” on the House floor yesterday.
“The last time we had a tax cut, they said it would create millions of jobs,” Quinn said. “I’ve got news for them: Not one single job was created in Buffalo, New York.”
That’s exactly right, Congressman. Bush made a bunch of promises, predictions, and pledges about the terrific benefits we’d see if America listened to him in 2001. Bush assured all of us we could afford it all: huge tax cut, increased spending, military buildup, Social Security reform, saving Medicare, deficit reduction, plus a massive contingency fund in case of emergency. He promised his plan would grow the economy, create jobs, and prevent a recession.
Quinn is right. Not only has Buffalo failed to see a single new job, but unemployment is up nationwide. In fact, none of the promises Bush made about the budget and the economy have come true. Not one.
And now he wants Congress to make another leap of faith. Bush wants the nation to forget his previous mistakes — from just two years ago — and trust him to do what no president has done before: wage war and cut taxes. Quinn and others in both parties are saying, “No.” In light of the president’s credibility on the issue, I’m hoping they can recruit some more friends.
As Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne said yesterday, “In a time of war, it should not fall to this honorable handful of House members to state the obvious. A government proposing revolutionary departures in foreign policy should not pretend that its objectives can be pursued painlessly and with no disturbance to its domestic objectives. Supporters of going to war have regularly chastised their opponents for refusing to face the reality of Saddam Hussein’s threat and the need for radical measures to eliminate it. Now it is their turn to face reality.”