With all the budget-cutting plans being released, I think it would be nice to consider some things that aren't "on the table".
We have been living in fairy-tale land for the past decade. After September 11, 2001, the United States has been, regardless of how one feels about the policy decisions, in a state of war. We are currently engaged on two fronts (please don't forget we have 50,000 troops in Iraq). Like every military operation since the end of the Second World War, however, we have conducted ourselves as if we are a nation at peace. The disconnect between our domestic policy and our actual commitments has become all the greater precisely because we find ourselves in the odd position, historically speaking, of fighting a war during a major economic downturn.
After the attacks of September 11, when it was clear there would be a military response, we had an opportunity to mobilize the American people behind a sensible approach. Instead, Pres. Bush decided, even as he sent troops to Afghanistan and started a mostly fraudulent PR campaign for an attack on Iraq, to spend the enormous political capital he received to push for even greater tax cutting measures than those that had passed in the pre-attack summer of 2001. It was quite amazing to listen to all the talk comparing what happened on that horrible day to Pearl Harbor, all the while not a single word was spoken about the sacrifices we might be called upon to give as a whole nation. Instead, even as the recession that resulted from the collapse of the tech bubble worsened due to the attacks, Pres. Bush urged us . . . to go to the Mall.
I think some history is important. Just before he was assassinated, Pres. Kennedy had been working hard to push through Congress a major tax cut. The plan stalled until after his assassination, when Pres. Johnson urged Congress to pass it, along with groundbreaking Civil Rights and Social welfare legislation as part of Kennedy's legacy. While all these measures were working their way through Congress, Johnson also was planning a major increase in our commitment to South Vietnam. In February of 1965, troops got off landing craft along the coast of South Vietnam. This initial commitment was only the beginning, and within a few years, the US had hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground, with the Navy and Air Force flying missions over North Vietnam.
By 1968, the situation, from an economic standpoint, became untenable. The loss of revenue from the tax cuts combined with the explosive commitment to the Vietnam conflict created an inflationary situation, as well as rumblings over the fiscal problem. Domestic politics being as volatile as they were, asking for a tax increase, or any other measure of fiscal responsibility, to help make up the difference was impossible.
In the four decades since then, we haven't gotten any better at dealing with reality. Our commitment to Afghanistan has gone on longer than our commitment to South Vietnam, at least on such a vast scale. All the while, we have pretended we could keep the home fires burning without any sacrifice. Lower taxes, particularly on the wealthiest, was far more important than making sure the military was funded. Republicans in office get huffy over the National Endowment for the Arts, whose budget could cover a couple aircraft carriers. Even the way Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld tried to hide the cost of the war - keeping it "off-budget" through a separate, emergency, contingency funding process - didn't work all that well (and does no one remember how the Iraqis were going to pay us back for invading their country? I didn't think so).
Since Korea, we have tried to pretend we are not a nation at war. We don't declare war anymore in Congress. At best, Congresses pass resolutions that permit the President to use the military to achieve certain general policy goals. Once we argue our way through those, we continue as before; for all the blather among so many about "Supporting the Troops", we here at home go about our lives as if nothing untoward were happening.
Events of the past decade should have awakened us not so much to the perils of trusting Republicans with the responsibility of governance (although, yeah, that, too) as given us a wake-up call. We are a nation at war. All those folks out there who insist this has been true for a very long time should also be talking about ponying up. We don't necessarily need the kind of mobilization involved on the homefront during the Second World War. At the very least, however, we need to be not talking about tax cuts and budgetary austerity while we have hundreds of thousands of soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen and pilots in harms way. We need to stop talking about fiscal restraint, or anything else, until we first and foremost make it clear that we are not living in any ordinary time. We have commitments that must be met, an obligation to provide the military with the proper tools to complete the tasks they've been assigned. Rather than peace-time budgeting, maybe we need to do our budgeting with at least one eye on the reality that we need to pay for stuff, lots of stuff, to finish this.
It might include partial domestic mobilization. It might include wage and price controls. It might include setting aside restrictions on how contracts are allocated. It might include, yes, confiscatory taxes, at least on some level. It might even include, since no one seems to want to use the "D" word, increasing recruitment targets, spending money not just to get more bodies in uniform, but keeping the ones we have.
All of this needs to be discussed. Not Bowles-Simpson or anything else. We need to start talking about the economy and federal spending without pretending we aren't at war. We need, in short, to get dope-slapped back to reality. I have few hopes this will happen, but it still what we need. We can have all sorts of serious, substantive discussions about everything from the tax code to the National Endowment of Humanities to rethinking our approach to defense policy and force structure, but in the meantime we need to wake up and realize we are a country at war. Support it or not, that is where we are.
As a professor of mine use to say, shit or get off the pot.
