August 3, 2009
Shop us to victory
“America is not at war. The Marine Corps is at war. America is at the mall.” So says the message in a photo floating around the Internet, popular on several Marine-related Web sites. On one site, a fourth line has been added: “And Congress is out to lunch.”
If this is correct and America is really “at the mall,” maybe what we need is a 1 percent federal sales tax specifically to pay for the war. Let Americans do what they appear to do best, “shop us to victory.” Then, everyone in the U.S. will be sacrificing for their country.
How many Starbucks coffee sales would it take to buy a new Humvee vehicle or M16 rifle?
Air Force Maj. Van Harl (ret.)
Altus, Okla.
A letter to the Marine Corps Times.
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Thank. God.
What a genuinely fascinating idea. It’s certainly not a stretch to say that the tax we’re most directly familiar is the sales tax. Most people generally ignore income taxes outside of April, but they can’t really miss a sales tax.
The two obvious complications are these: would we really notice even a full 2% increase as an additional sacrifice for a specific purpose? (Even if it were specifically labelled as such on the receipt, few people look that regularly/at all.) And, the federal government doesn’t currently levy a sales tax, getting one passed for this specific purpose seems politically possible, but not likely. (And getting each state to increase their’s and pass the revenue on to the Feds sounds like a logistical nightmare.)