Sunday, Oct. 7, 2007 | 7:20 a.m.
WASHINGTON - All week public television has been showing a sweeping Ken Burns documentary on World War II. The work shows the extraordinary contributions to the war made by ordinary Americans, which inevitably invites comparisons to today.
President Bush has talked about the sacrifices of the Iraq war; but as a congressman noted last week, a sign from a military base in Iraq reads: "America is not at war. The Marine Corps is at war; America is at the mall."
The congressman, Rep. James McGovern of Massachusetts, was among three senior House Democrats who unveiled a proposal for a 2-percent-to-15-percent surtax on Americans' income taxes to pay for the war in Iraq, similar to those levied during World War II and the Vietnam War.
Within hours, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid distanced himself from the proposal, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi flatly opposed it.
"We believe the war should be paid like everything else, it should paid for through the president's (budget)," Reid said later in the week. "Every penny of the war, the president's borrowed money. We don't think that's the right way to go."
Nevada Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley "does not support this particular proposal," her spokesman David Cherry said, "but she does agree we need to have an honest discussion about paying for this war."
Few expected the proposal to be embraced - even the authors understood the long odds against passing a war tax in a Congress that is unable to muster the votes to change course in the war.
Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and the author of several books on American history, said Democrats' unwillingness to even entertain a discussion about war taxes shows the triumph of Reagan-era conservative arguments in American politics.
Although President Reagan ran up record budget deficits, ever since his presidency the debate over taxes has not been how much to raise them but how much they should be cut - and who benefits.
Republicans, Zelizer said, successfully have "taken taxes off the table." Democrats have acted as willing, if quietly reluctant, accomplices. "Now it's not only in times of peace, it's time of war."
Democrats quickly calculated last week that the T-word - even in the context of a highly unpopular war - would become toxic for them. As if on cue, Republicans had dashed off talking points with screaming headlines that included: "Democrats Push Massive New Taxes on All Americans."
No wonder Reid and others backed away. Democrats "don't want that conversation," Zelizer said.
They refuse to engage despite indications that attitudes outside of Washington are changing. Voters trust Democrats to handle fiscal issues, polls show, and The Washington Post reported last week that a slim majority of Americans, 52 percent, want the government to do more to solve problems - a shift from the height of the Republican revolution a decade ago when nearly two-thirds wanted less government.
But in Congress , Democrats clearly aren't buying it. Zelizer thinks it would take a national emergency before Democrats would feel comfortable talking taxes ; and shy of that, he expects Washington will broach the subject only if a conservative lawmaker leads the way.
When Democrats shrank from the issue last week, anti-war activists responded with understanding and idealism. A small poll on the liberal dailykos.com Web site split respondents, as some bloggers said the debate would be a helpful discussion about the war's costs and others said Democrats were right to insulate themselves from the backlash.
Together the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost the country $610 billion , according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis in Washington. President Bush will ask Congress for nearly $200 billion more in coming weeks.
To give those numbers some perspective: The country burns through nearly $14 billion a month in the wars, most of it in Iraq. About three months' spending in Iraq could pay for the entire five-year expansion of a popular children's health care program Bush vetoed last week.
In past wars, costs became integral components to the debate, Zelizer said. President Franklin Roosevelt proposed the income tax system we know today to pay for the war , and discussion of the new tax helped explain and solidify support for the war.
During the Vietnam War, Congress' insistence that President Lyndon Johnson could not afford both guns and butter intensified dissatisfaction with the war itself.
But those two Democratic presidents and their congressional allies found it easier to impose taxes because they supported the wars.
With most Democratic lawmakers and Americans now opposing the war in Iraq, strategists argue it is unclear what the party would gain from raising the tax issue. But it's clear what it would risk.
"Now we have a generation that remembers Ronald Reagan rather than Franklin Roosevelt," Zelizer said. "It's not a generation that really remembers this famous sacrifice."
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