A letter to the editor in today's NYT caught my eye:
To the Editor:
While I agree with you that reinstating the draft is not the solution, I also strongly agree with Representative Charles B. Rangel that we should all share some of the burden when the country goes to war.
If our leaders had asked for a greater shared burden before sending us to war in Iraq, we would be more united as a country today through our shared “ownership” of the problem.
Rather than the draft, why not impose a stiff $2-per-gallon gasoline war tax? Such a tax should be structured to end as soon as the war ends and the vast majority of our troops have returned.
Nearly all of us would feel the sting, and would share a desire to find real solutions rather than using the misery for political advantage.
A $2-per-gallon war tax could finance much of the warÂ’s cost without saddling future generations with debt, and would force all of us to consider how our enormous consumption of oil contributes to the problem.
Per Halvorsen
Branford, Conn., Nov. 21, 2006
Regardless of how you feel about Rangel's proposal to re-instate the draft, I like this idea very much. The one problem with it is that it -- just like our current "volunteer" military -- would hit the poor harder than it would hit the rich. It would, however, have the additional benefit of making big honking Lexus SUVs much more expensive to drive.
A good alternative would be to tax, not gasoline at the pump, but oil company profits, which have been beyond obscene recently. Let the oil companies decide if they want incurnur the public ire that will result from raising gasoline prices to cover the tax or if they want to swallow the difference and live off measly, say, 10 or 15 percent profit for a change. If the owners of the Bush junta knew that they were going to have to pay for this war, you'd see Bush begin to advocate "cutting and running" in a way that would make all of his previous attempts to "propel the propaganda" look like idle chatter.
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