A Robin Hood Tax to Pay for the Wars

Two weeks until Election Day, and no-one is talking about the wars, the New York Times reports. (Of course, that's not quite true: as the Washington Post reports, for example, this former Army Green Beret is running for Congress in Missouri on a platform of ending the war in Afghanistan.)

Unsurprisingly, the wars may have slipped down on many people's lists of top concerns in the face of 9.5% officially measured unemployment and the foreclosure crisis. But some people are talking about projected U.S. budget deficits and what to do about them, and since the permanent war is a major cause of projected budget deficits, that means the permanent war is on the table.

Furthermore, a key question hanging over the election is this: in America today, is it politically feasible to make the super-rich pay their fair share of taxes? So far, the answer given to this question by the election season seems to be no. Some Democrats thought that they had a winning issue politically in allowing the Bush tax cuts on the super-rich to expire, but, so far, it seems that they were wrong.

But here's a strategy that has not yet been fully explored: rather than simply urge that the super-rich be required to pay their fair share of taxes to support government expenditures in general, let's demand that particular increased taxes on the super-rich be earmarked to particular government expenditures that the super-rich will have a hard time dodging politically. In Britain, for example, there is a vigorous campaign to tie a particular tax increase on the well-off to a particular set of needed social expenditures. It's called, appropriately enough, the Robin Hood Tax.