On Tuesday, a guest blog post by two WWII vets, Taxes, Borrowing and War: WWII vs Vietnam and Iraq-Afghanistan, noted the connection between wars conducted by the US that do not resonate with the American people and the rising inequality and declining tax progressivity.
As these two WWII vets saaw it, WWII led to tax increases and ultimately to a golden era of shared productivity gains with high unionization. On the other end of the spectrum, the Iraq-Afghanistan wars have been fought with borrowed funds, with volunteer and mercenary armies (and military-industrial profiteers like Halliburton). Taxes have gone down instead of going up, and have gone down especially for the very rich. That kind of tax policy impacts inequality, and growth of inequality impacts real freedom.
All that means that the notion of America as the champion of freedom is distorted. Genuine freedom involves freedom of opportunity for the many, not freedom for the wealthy to continue to accrue unprecedented levels of wealth, without anti-trust or unions as a counterweight.
With wars of choice we get preemptive (for profit?) wars and decreasing tax progressivity, so that the middle class and poor pay with their lives and their taxes while the rich profit from the military-industrial war machine. We also end up with endlessly growing miltiary budgets, for a standing military that no other country in the world even seeks to emulate. We drive our middle class to poverty in order to maintain unprecedented, unneeded, and actually dangerous military might. The more the military has, the more it thinks it has to have, just to 'stay even'. Even Bruce Bartlett, conservative economist adviser to several presidents, asks whether we can afford the military budget. See Bruce Bartlett, Economix: Can We Afford the Military Budget?, NY Times, June 14, 2011.
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