Saturday, October 13, 2007

A sales tax on the price of freedom

On October 2nd or so a few members Democratic of congress purposed a bill to raise taxes to help cover the cost of the war in Iraq. People on both sides of congress quickly shot down the bill, but if it did pass and you are of middle or lower income you would have had only to pay an extra 2%, but if you where wealthy you would have had to pay an extra 15%.

I know must of you reading this will feel a nice breeze of relief hearing that this bill didn’t become a law because nobody likes to pay taxes and even more so they don’t want to have to pay even more in taxes. But the truth is that economically this bill made some sense on two factors.

The first factor makes since for those who want to end the war in Iraq. At the moment unless you are or know someone fighting in the war then there isn’t really much of a direct price you pay for this war right now. But if this tax did come in to being you of course would be effected by this war and that of course would make more people think about it. People think harder about things they have to pay for if it’s free (or seems free) they we take any crap. Once a price tag is fix to it the very same goods we judge it and ask…“is it really worth it?” It very, very likely that some of the same people who support the war (and even those who don’t think about it) now that wouldn’t if they had to pay extra in taxes for it. and in all likelihood they while start to become vocal (or more vocal) about it and ask for the war to end.

The other factor doesn’t really matter if you are for or against this war but with the truth that hardly gets talked about. “How are we going to pay for this war?” Right now, we are getting deeply into more and more debt because of this war. IF we don’t want this country to fall to far into the hole and risk the chance of being stuck in the position to have to pay billions of dollars to other countries just to pay off our nations credit card bill in the future we need to be a bit more fiscally balanced. When it comes to this war we really need to start to PAY FOR AS MUCH AS WE CAN NOW INSTEAD OF LATER.

Now I don’t know if this ideal would be the best way but at least it would cover are bill now instead of having us (and maybe even are children and grandkids) pay for it in the future. If we don’t go with a tax but still fill we need to pay for the war instead of getting in debt because of it, we could go with things like war bonds. Besides we could use new cartoons that slip in war bond jokes that kids today would understand (Bugs Bunny your nation needs you right now.)

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