Ezra Klein points out one of the big hyprocracies of our current political debates: the unwillingness to raise taxes to pay for our wars while insisting that any health care reform be "deficit neutral".
This is, to put it simply, insane. As Annie Lowrey points out, Obey isn't trying to make the Iraq and Afghanistan wars deficit-neutral. He's not even trying to pay for the total 2010 spending on the two wars. The 1 percent surtax would fund one of the wars, for one year. And even that's proving too much. We're not just unwilling to pay for these wars. We're unwilling to pay for 6 percent of these wars. To put that number in context, the Senate health-care bill pays for 114 percent of itself. And people say that's not enough!
Politicians that really care about the deficit should focus on paying for war.
No comments:
Post a Comment