CAN WAR SELL THE TAX
CUT?
Home Front
Jonathan Chait *
When the Bush administration unveiled its proposed
budget early last month, it made no provision at all for war with Iraq. At
first, the White House defended this omission by asserting that war might not
happen at all. "It would have been very unnatural," argued Budget
Director Mitch Daniels on February 3, "to include costs for a conflict
that Saddam Hussein could avert at any day by complying with the world
community's eleven years of demands that he disarm." (Daniels said this
one week after Hans Blix told the United Nations that Saddam was not complying
with weapons inspectors and one day after The New York Times detailed the
Pentagon's plan for war with Iraq.) After war became a certainty, the Bushies
shifted to arguing that they couldn't provide a war estimate because, as
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it, "There's no calculation that you
can do about all of these variables." This is roughly analogous to parents
deciding they're not going to begin a college fund because they don't yet know
what schools their kid will attend.
The suspicion all along was that the administration
was delaying its war estimate until after Congress acceded to its proposed tax
cuts. Last Friday, when a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Ari
Fleischer if Bush was postponing his request for war funding until Congress
approved his budget, Fleischer replied, "No." Then, that very
afternoon, the Senate voted down an amendment to halve the tax cut, apparently
paving the way for Bush's plan. (A subsequent vote to shrink the tax cut this
week came as a surprise.) On Monday, Bush promptly asked Congress for $75
billion to fight the war and begin postwar peacekeeping. Were the two events
related? Not at all, insisted an administration official. Rather, the White
House was suddenly able to estimate the war's cost because, "We found that
there would not be an immediate surrender of the Iraq regime, that there would
be some resistance," the official explained. Of course, this explanation
came as the Pentagon was telling reporters that it had never assumed otherwise.
For months, there has been a widespread assumption in
Washington that, once the war with Iraq is successfully completed, Republicans
will use the patriotic afterglow to push through the most controversial
elements of Bush's domestic agenda. What virtually no one imagined was that
they would begin doing so as soon as the war began. The GOP strategy was set
out by a Republican leadership aide speaking anonymously to Roll Call this
week. "As one evaluates the next three weeks," the aide said,
"you have got to say, 'Okay, let's assume in a war context the public
doesn't have an appetite for bickering and the president's approval is
additional leverage."
One reason for the hurry may be that Democrats and
even many moderate Republicans have somehow gotten the idea that it might not
make sense to enact yet another huge tax cut as the country embarks upon a war
of unknown cost or duration. "I'd put off a tax program until after the
war," GOP Representative Amo Houghton recently told Congressional
Quarterly. Senator John McCain called for a moratorium on any new tax cuts or
major nondefense spending. The larger idea, of course, is that wars require
some measure of public sacrifice often tax increases and certainly not large
tax cuts. The White House is trying to stamp out this disturbing outbreak of
public-mindedness by making a fairly novel argument: It would be unpatriotic
not to cut taxes. Wartime, according to this administration, demands that we
put aside our partisan differences and unite behind the president so he can
complete the crucial job of starving the government of the funds it needs to
prosecute the war.
Asked a week ago about McCain's plan to postpone tax
cuts until after the war, Fleischer replied that tax cuts would ensure that,
"when the war is over, our military has jobs to come home to." Since
this seems to be the administration's new line Fleischer has repeated it twice
more since it is worth considering in all its glorious absurdity. First,
soldiers aren't going to "come home" after the war the way they did
after Vietnam. We now have an all-volunteer, professional army, and the
administration is not proposing to shrink its size anytime soon. When the war
is over, the soldiers will still have jobs as soldiers. Yes, reservists have
been called up, but they have a legal right to resume whatever job they left.
Second, given that the administration's budget
projects just one month of combat, the war will almost certainly have ended
before the tax cuts are even signed into law, let alone have any effect on the
economy. One provision of Bush's tax cut, for instance, would make the
estate-tax repeal, scheduled to take effect in 2010, permanent. Now, Bush could
honestly argue that those soldiers who serve for seven years and then come home
and inherit multimillion-dollar fortunes should not have to pay any tax on
their windfall. But doing so would deprive his position of its moral punch.
Republicans have also tried to whip wavering moderates
into supporting tax cuts by stressing the need for national unity. "They're
telling everybody to support the president in a time of war," GOP
Representative Cliff Stearns of Florida told Congressional Quarterly. The
notion that the successful prosecution of the war depends upon passing Bush's
domestic agenda in toto may, too, seem counterintuitive at first. The best
explication of how this dynamic would work came from Republican Senator Kay
Bailey Hutchison of Texas. "When our troops are over there fighting,"
she said in a floor speech last week, "we don't want partisan bickering to
be what they see on television from back home." Again, this incorporates a
novel understanding of the American soldier. Troops in combat do not, after
all, have much opportunity to watch television (and those who do presumably
include relatively few C-SPAN buffs). One might also assume that whatever tiny
minority of troops has found a way to monitor the floor debate in Congress
could, having experienced the grisly carnage of war, take in a contested Senate
vote with some equanimity. But let us suppose that there are a greater number
of debate-averse, emotionally delicate, news-junkie troops on the front line
than one might expect. Surely, the best way to avoid upsetting them is not to
ram through a controversial tax cut on a party-line vote, as the White House
has sought to do, but instead to postpone the debate until after the war. Of
course, that would raise a frightening prospect: debating the tax cut on its
own merits.
* The New Republic, april 07, 2003. Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at TNR.
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