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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political activism > Armed conflict
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Taxing Wars - The American Way of War Finance and the Decline of Democracy (Hardcover)
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Taxing Wars - The American Way of War Finance and the Decline of Democracy (Hardcover)
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Shortly after speaking with a bullhorn amidst the still-smoking
wreckage at the World Trade Center site, President George W. Bush
urged Americans to 'get down to Disney World in Florida...take your
families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.'
Americans, he implied, should not merely offer sacrifices but
return to normalcy. Consistent with this anecdote, his
administration cut taxes, and held of efforts by a renegade group
of anti-war Congress members to introduce a 'share the sacrifice'
war tax for Iraq in 2007. According to the tax's opponents,
Americans were already being 'taxed to death.' The ultimate result
of all of this is that the government has financed the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan entirely through borrowing. As Sarah Kreps shows in
Taxing Wars, the type of debt financing for war that we have seen
since 9/11 could not have been more different from earlier
experiences when wars meant taxation. For instance, in 1914-three
years before America's direct involvement in World War I-President
Wilson urged war taxes as a way to fund defense preparations.
Indeed, the Wilson Administration levied a series of war taxes
before, during, and after the war, amounting to about one-third of
the war's costs. Why, when Wilson was aiming to recruit rather than
repel support for the war, did he introduce measures such as a
hefty war tax that recent leaders have considered politically
toxic? Why was the public so magnanimous in its willingness to
contribute its own resources? By contrast, why did leaders not use
the crisis of war, often used as entrees for introducing war taxes
in the past, in the aftermath of 9/11 to extract resources from the
populace in a way that been customary in the past? More generally,
what explains shifting attitudes towards bearing the financial
burden of war and the move away from war taxes, and the
consequences of that shift? Kreps argues that the starkly different
approaches are the result of public attitudes towards wartime
fiscal sacrifice that vary depending on the underlying type of war
and state-society relations. The public accepted the sacrifices
that the state demanded during the two world wars, an effect of
both the nature of those wars and the public's more favorable views
toward government in that era. However, when these factors combine
to make the public cost sensitive, leaders have pursued forms of
war finance that anticipate opposition and minimize constraints on
the way they use force. In post-1945 wars, the public has become
almost uniformly unforgiving of fiscal sacrifice, which explains
leaders' increased tendency to rely on less visible forms of
finance such as borrowing. The lack of visibility has had an
important knock-on effect too: Leaders have been able to
increasingly operate without the type of decision-making
constraints that were present in earlier war efforts which depended
upon broader levels of public support. Her ultimate conclusion is
both sobering and extremely important: the deterioration of
decision-making accountability with regard to war in the second
half of the twentieth century has allowed leaders to wage
increasingly costly and protracted wars. And because the health of
a democracy can be measured by how responsive leaders are to an
informed and attentive public in times of war, our current
practices suggest that we are edging ever closer to how
non-democracies conduct war.
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