The Democrats War Tax

The Democrats’ War Tax
They want to add it on top of the others
by Justin Raimondo

Sen. Carl Levin has a solution to the problem of how to finance our losing, futile war in Afghanistan – a war we are fighting to support what has now been officially deemed the second most corrupt government on earth: he wants a war tax. An "additional income tax to the upper brackets, folks earning more than $200,000 or $250,000" a year is what the Michigan Democrat and powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee proposes. His colleagues in the House have the same idea, only their tax is far less "progressive."

David Obey, chairman of the influential Appropriations Committee, John Murtha, who chairs the Defense Subcommittee, and Barney Frank, the banksters’ catamite who heads up the House Financial Services Committee, have proposed the "Share the Sacrifice Act of 2010" – and isn’t that a title worthy of Atlas Shrugged’s mealy-mouthed villains? In this "share-the-shafting" version of the Democrats’ war tax, everyone is conscripted into paying for our foreign policy of endless war, including those who are least able to afford it. If you make "up to $150,000" a year you would have to pay an extra 1 percent. The balance will come from those who make more. Now that’s real egalitarianism for you: all must suffer, none are spared, because… well, don’t you know there’s a war on?

What – you’re against a tax hike? You’re no doubt a terrorist sympathizer, or, perhaps, even an agent of al-Qaeda.

I can hardly wait for the Democrats to employ this type of rhetoric, memorializing the neocon charge, made during the post-9/11 madness, that opponents of invading Afghanistan and Iraq constituted a "fifth column" – oh, wait, it’s already happened. (Andrew Sullivan, who made just that accusation against the antiwar movement, can now hurl the same charge at tax opponents, since he seems to have switched sides, or parties, in the meantime. Oh, the advantages of ideological ambidexterity!)

But of course we are already paying a war tax, and it is a lot bigger than the official statistics would have you believe. The government claims to spend a mere 20 percent of tax revenue on military appropriations, but in reality, as the War Resisters League trenchantly points out, the number is more like 36 percent – and that’s not counting the 18 percent spent on past wars.

In addition to these revealing numbers, we have a substantial hidden tax – the inflation tax – which, again, targets those who can least afford it and also punishes the virtuous among the working poor and middle class: the savers. To the extent that the government can, it tries to disguise its plundering, pillaging ways, and these stealth tactics include "monetizing" its debts, i.e., printing money hand over fist and degrading its own fiat paper currency, mortgaging our children’s tomorrows to pay for the wars we fight today.

This is a method Rep. Frank knows only too well, which is why he tried to scuttle antiwar Republican Ron Paul’s "Audit the Fed" bill, which would open up to public scrutiny the operations of the "private" banking cartel that makes our debt-driven system possible. It was the Federal Reserve that bailed out Barney’s friends over at Goldman Sachs and Bank of America – and certainly the War Machine is also "too big to fail." More human sacrifices must be made on the altar of the war god before that cruel deity is appeased: that’s what they really mean by "share the sacrifice."

Continue reading: http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/11/22/the-democrats-...