Shock and Owe

The shocking thing about the Bush administration’s price tag for the war in Iraq is not its size, although $74.7 billion is an awe-inspiring sum. Nor is it the precision now for something recently described by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as “not knowable” – despite its nitpicky appearance, that decimal point represents the nice round figure of $700 million.

The shock comes from the fact that this nation has gone to war, a war that, in the eyes of the administration, most of Congress and a large portion of the American public is a just and necessary war for security and liberation, without a key element of war. That element is sacrifice.

There is sacrifice aplenty in Iraq; the losses over last weekend made real President Bush’s frequent warnings that this war could be long and difficult; the resilience and determination of our troops are inspiring. It is on the home front that sacrifice is missing.

The administration demands that this supplemental war budget be funded as is for $726 billion in tax cuts, of which $500 billion will go to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. This was cut nearly in half (to $350 billion) by the Senate Tuesday, but the House is committed to the whole. The final reconciled package most likely will fall somewhere in between, while actual costs of the war, of rebuilding Iraq, of homeland security remain unknown but certainly very high. The result, then, will be a slightly lower altitude for soaring federal deficits and damage only slightly less than ruinous to states struggling to meet increasing federal mandates as they struggle to comply with revenue-busting changes in the federal tax code. The Senate’s reduction, for example, saves Maine about $189 million over the next two years. Put another way, it will cost Maine about $189 million over the next two years.

Just as the frantic resistance offered by the Iraqi army requires U.S. and British military commanders to revise their war plans, circumstances now require the administration and Congress to rethink fiscal policy. The time has passed for touting tax cuts as the fix for a sputtering economy; in fact, the surge in the stock markets in the encouraging opening days of the war provides strong evidence that a successful conclusion and historically low interest rates will combine to produce the entire boost the economy can stand.

The most singular failure of the administration and Congress since Sept. 11 has been their willingness to talk of the need for Americans to sacrifice while shielding Americans from any meaningful sacrifice save longer waits in line at the airport. Oil, for example, is the cash cow of terrorism, yet there has been no government-led effort to encourage even public-spirited conservation.

Now, we are at war to make the world a safer place and to free an oppressed people, we will provide massive amounts of humanitarian aid to those people, we will enhance homeland security for ourselves and we will do it by running up huge deficits for future taxpayers to cover. Among those future taxpayers, it need hardly be said, will be many young Americans now in Iraq making sacrifices that ought to be quite enough.