The Real Cost of War Taxes
By Colman McCarthy
America’s military programs function year-round, but April is when an estimated 130 million federally tax paying citizens supply most of the cash by way of checks to the Internal Revenue Service.
How many dollars per person? It’s all but impossible to know with any precision. The difficulty is that military budgets are toted collectively in millions, billions and lately trillions--and rarely in understandable per person numbers.
Is there any other exchange of money between givers and takers in which givers have only vague ideas, if that, of exactly how many dollars they did give? It’s not idle speculation to conclude that opposition to the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would be far more felt in the gut if each taxpayer viscerally knew his or her own tab--and knew in graspable pocketbook sums, not budgetary trillions.
Occasionally some numbers are floated. In the newly published “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” Professors Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes write that “every American household is spending $138 per month on the current operating cost of the wars, with a little more than $100 a month going to Iraq alone.”
In 2004, Joshua Goldstein, then a professor at American University, came in with a far higher amount. In “The Real Price of War: How You Pay for the War on Terror,” he said the typical family pays $500 a month. “To see what the U.S. government’s war-related spending costs your household,” he wrote, “let’s install a parking meter in your living room. Put a quarter in the meter and you get 20 minutes of security. Six quarters gets you two hours. Keep feeding the meter around the clock, 24/7, year round… The quarters add up to about $500 a month.”
That was four years ago. In 2008, more quarters and quicker hands are needed. Professor Goldstein says the bill is now $750 a month—up from $6,000 a year to $9,000.
The National Priorities Project in Amherst, Mass., reports that a $5,000 tax bill means $1,350 goes to the military. If $10,000, it’s $2,700—and on up.
The fluctuations are the result of the different ways of counting. Mathematicians at the Center for Defense Information, a Washington non-profit with a necessarily high-powered adding machine because it specializes in military waste and fraud, came in last year with a total military and security budget of $878 billion. The sum included the big- ticket billions for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, nuclear weapons in the Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Department of Veteran Affairs, the Coast Guard, the anti-terrorism budget, military aid to allies and friendly dictators, pensions and past war debts. If pumped up to a rounded $900 billion—you’ve forgotten Pentagon overruns, contractor deceit, supplmentals and emergency supplementals?—the daily bill is $2.4 billion or $28,500 a second.
The amount ponied up by individuals depends on tax brackets, deductions and whether or not you have a skilled loophole accountant and/or tax lawyer--as well as how much of the war costs are carried by borrowing from such friends as the dictators of China.
If inexactitude reigns, it appears that much of the frequently polled public is certain about one reality: its war tax money is being wasted on a long useless war. So?, as Dick Cheney might say. Or as Gen. Alexander Haig did say in the late 1960s about a massive demonstration against the Vietnam War: “Let them march all they want, as long as they pay their taxes.” As the general sagely knew, people can march for peace, hope for peace, pray for peace—but they still pay for war.
A modest solution exists: the Religious Freedom Tax Fund Bill which has been before every Congress since 1972. It would allow citizens who are conscientious objectors to war the right to direct their full share of taxes to non-military programs. Mostly lost in the obscurity of backwater bills that everyone knows will never be enacted but let’s not lose heart, it was most recently mentioned by Congressman John Lewis of Georgia, who introduced the bill in April 2007. Lewis was speaking at a Sunday morning forum at Washington’s National Cathedral on March 30. The first question during the Q&A was on war and money: what’s a citizen of conscience to do who doesn’t want to pay for U.S. militarism. In a brief reply, Lewis explained that his bill would create a fund in the federal treasury for people whose religious or moral convictions forbid participation in war—including paying for it.
The bill, whose co-sponsors included John Conyers, James Oberstar, Jim McGovern, Tammy Baldwin and some three dozen others on the Left, has never moved out of the Ways and Means Committee in 36 years. Across the street at the Supreme Court, it’s no better. The Court has never ruled in favor of a conscientious tax refuser. It’s explainable. The word conscience is not in the Constitution.
Another explanation might be found in the thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr., of whose life and ideals were the focus of John Lewis’s words at the cathedral. In his April 4, 1967, sermon in a New York City pulpit, a sermon that couldn’t be ignored in the recent 40th anniversary observances of King’s death, King said: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on programs of military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
I may have missed it, but did any of the three presidential candidates--so effusive in their praising pieties of the slain King—quote those lines on April 4, the 40th anniversary of King’s death? Or even less likely, agree with them?
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Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington D.C. He teaches courses on nonviolence at three public high schools, American University and Georgetown University Law Center.