Two congressmen (Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., chairman of the purse string-controlling House Appropriations Committee; and Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee) are calling for a tax on 'the wealthy' to pay for the War on Terrorism in Afghanistan.
"If we have to pay for the health care bill, we should pay for the war as well ... by having a war surtax," Obey told ABC News in an interview that aired Monday. "The problem in this country with this issue is that the only people that has to sacrifice are military families and they've had to go to the well again and again and again and again, and everybody else is blithely unaffected by the war."
Surely the military families have borne the greatest burden in this and in any war, but the idea of a surtax (based on Income Tax returns, and only for a select group of tax payers) is new.
No, the idea that "the wealthy" should bear the greatest tax burden is far from new. They already do, and politicians find it easy to play the Class Card when proposing new taxes.
What is new is the Congress now feels it safe to attack "the wealthy" in a tax over and beyond the income tax ... which "the wealthy" now pay an overwhelming majority of what becomes income for the Federal Government.
Congress once was called upon to vote whether or not to end "The War on Terrorism", but were either too cowardly or too shame-faced to actually put their vote where there mouth is. Now they have found a new way to attract unlikely allies in their continuing campaign to end American participation in the necessary -- but unpalatable -- war.
The Wealthy.
But what's even worse is the attempt to justify new taxation based on the assumed inevitability of the National Health Care bill.
Now we can be just like The Brits: Subjects, not Citizens.
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