Robert Maguire's Library tagged iraq →  View Popular

We'll start with the Civil War. Congress enacted various income and excise taxes to meet the rising cost of the war, most of which were repealed in the years after the war.

During World War I, the 1916 Revenue Act and the War Revenue Act of 1917 increased tax revenue from $761 million in 1916 to $3.6 billion in 1918. After the war, in the 1920s, Congress cut taxes five times.

The same was true during World War II. Tax increases over several years raised revenues from $8.7 billion in 1941 to $45.2 billion in 1945. Again, tax cuts followed the war.

"Traditionally countries raise taxes to pay for wars, then cut taxes by a portion of the amount raised once peace descends," agreed J.D. Foster, senior fellow in the economics of fiscal policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

But Foster noted two caveats. One, the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 came during a jobless recovery period after a recession. And the economic stimulus package championed by Obama includes $282 billion in tax cuts over two years -- also in the midst of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In fact, recent events suggest a move backwards as the entropy of the Arab and Muslim world reasserts itself. Sectarian violence is up. Little integration of Sunnis in the largely Shiite "national" military has occurred. Core questions of Sunni representation and central issues of territory - such as the Kurdish-Arab fight over Kirkuk - remain unresolved. Lawmakers who told the Americans they were past sectarianism are stoking it again:

Mr. Hashimi, a Sunni who told me not long ago that Iraq was now ready
for historic reconciliation, was widely accused of acting in a purely
sectarian way to ensure more votes for his bloc. The Parliament’s
Shiite and Kurdish blocs promptly joined forces in last week’s session
and, despite intense American lobbying, passed yet another election law
that would reduce Sunni seats even more.

Adopting legislation to knit the country together; reforming the
Constitution; strengthening independent security forces; reconciling
Iraq’s Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — all were benchmarks, and all remain
partly or wholly unmet, despite the security gains that were supposed
to create the space for political progress and thus peace. Instead, Iraqis treat their Constitution — like the benchmarks — the way they treat what few traffic lights operate here.

“So what?” a Kurdish lawmaker, Mahmoud Othman, said when asked about
the risk of holding the election later than the Constitution demands.
“Nothing in Iraq is very legitimate.”

But in June of 2008 alone, the military lost 44 trucks and 220,000 gallons of fuel as long fuel convoys were waylaid by IEDs, weather, traffic and stealing, the study says. While the military purchases fuel at about $2 to $3 per gallon, the additional expense of air and ground protection and transportation pushes the price of each gallon to $45, Deloitte said.

“This study demonstrates that the development and use of alternative energy can be a direct cause for reductions in wartime casualties and may rank on par with the business cases for development of ever more effective offensive weapons, sophisticated fuel transport tankers, mine resistant armored vehicles and net-centric sensing technologies,” the report says.