Pay to win: raising taxes during wartime has never been fun. Why other presidents did it.

• Author: Mehrotra, Ajay K.
• Position: War and Taxes - Book review

War and Taxes

by Steven A. Bank, Kirk J. Stark, and Joseph J. Thorndike

Urban Institute Press, 224 pp.

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In April 2003, two weeks after the United States launched the invasion of Iraq that currently costs Americans $12 billion a month, then House majority leader Tom DeLay declared that "Nothing is more important in the face of war than cutting taxes." The next month, DeLay followed through by joining his fellow House Republicans in passing a package of tax cuts that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would drain nearly $61 billion from the federal treasury in 2003 alone.

Just decades earlier, when military hawks were also deficit hawks, such words and deeds would have been unimaginable. As one Republican lawmaker explained in 1967, "I just don't see how we can be hawks on the war and then vote against taxes to pay for it." This contrast in wartime tax policy is the subject of War and Taxes, a provocative and fascinating new book by tax scholars Steven A. Bank, Kirk J. Stark, and Joseph J. Thorndike. Synthesizing earlier historical scholarship, the authors examine the social, political, and economic conditions that have driven fiscal policymaking during every major U.S. conflict from the American Revolution to the present entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan. The result should be required reading for all lawmakers--no matter who wins in November.

War and Taxes isn't intended as a partisan brief against the Bush administration and its penchant for tax cuts and deficit spending. Instead, the authors have set out to provide a judicious, if at times ironic, history of opposition to wartime tax increases. In contrast to the conventional presumption that wartime patriotism has always and everywhere trumped self-interest, they contend that America's "commitment to wartime fiscal sacrifice has always been uneasy--and more than a little ambiguous." Although they concede that the Bush administration's wartime tax cuts mark an "abrupt departure" from "a strong tradition of wartime fiscal sacrifice," the authors seek to show that our current president is not the first commander in chief "to delay, deny, and obscure the trade-off between guns and butter."

The book's carefully marshaled historical evidence, however, spotlights the unprecedented nature of George W. Bush's fiscal policies. And herein lies the irony: War and Taxes does provide a valuable corrective to the overly romanticized history of wartime sacrifice, but it...