As Congress finalizes its plans to pass national health care reform, President Obama announced that he intends to send an additional 30,000 troops to support the war in Afghanistan.
The Senate health care plan has a cost of $848 billion over a ten year period, as projected by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.
According to the Congressional Research Service, over their concurring eight-year period, the combined cost for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will soon top $1 trillion within the next few months.
Elected leaders are scrounging for ideas to bring in revenue to pay for health care costs. Suggestions such as taxing sugary drinks, hygiene products, and taxes on cosmetic surgery have all been seriously considered.
But the issue is not whether health care can be paid for. The U.S. has the revenue: Iraq and Afghanistan.
In November Rep. David Obey (D-WI) proposed a progressive income surtax (an increase on an already existing tax) on all Americans. The bill is called the “Share the Sacrifice Act of 2010.” The bill would tie a tax increase to the escalation of troops in Afghanistan.
The tax would add an additional 1 percent tax for households that make between $30,000 and $150,000 a year and increasing for those over the $150,000 mark. It would also exempt military families as well as families who have lost a relative in either of the two conflicts. Although highly unlikely to pass Congress, it makes an important point.
Comparisons can be drawn between the Vietnam War under President Lyndon Johnson and now the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan under President Obama.
In the Washington Post on Dec. 1 Rep. Obey said, “That’s what happened with the Vietnam War, which wiped out the Great Society. In each case, the costs of those wars shut off our ability to afford anything else.”
In his speech on Dec. 1 announcing the escalation of troops to Afghanistan, President Obama said, “There are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized and we are better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. Yet this argument depends upon a false reading of history.”
As far as history goes, Johnson’s Great Society initiative, including his War on Poverty agenda, was established in 1964 during the same time the President escalated involvement in the Vietnam War.
Because of the distraction of war, most of the Johnson Administration’s domestic policies were left on the wayside, and the war on poverty was never won.
Today, while things are falling apart at home, and with the nation still in economic turmoil, it should be clear that there is a need to focus on the domestic agenda alone. Staying the course on current foreign policy path limits the nation’s ability to take care of itself at home.
As the country attempts to save lives at home through preventative health care, it will almost certainly lose more lives to war conflicts abroad.
A calculator provided by the National Priorities Project concluded that taxpayers living in San Bernardino County will have paid $5.2 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.
For the same amount of money, 2,132,788 people living in the county could have been provided with health care for one year.
If history has taught anything it’s that the cost of foreign policy entanglements abroad has hindered our ability to make social progress at home.
The Vietnam War killed the nation’s ability to make social change at home. The same might be said one day for Afghanistan, Iraq and health care.
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