Start Paying
Now for War

Public policy is best made when there is a clear understanding of costs and benefits.

The Democratic leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives deserves credit for reinstating a pay-as-you-go plan that requires any new spending to be offset with equal cuts or increases in revenue.

President Bush, with the complicity of the past Republican Congress, hid the true cost of the Iraq war with off-budget supplemental requests and massive deficit spending. The cost to date, which will be paid by our children and grandchildren is now nearly one trillion dollars.

Bush is now seeking another nearly $200 billion for Iraq. It is time we stop passing on the costs and start paying for this war of choice now.

Congress should match all future costs of the war in Iraq with a war tax on the weathiest 1% of American families. This group of Americans is the one that can best afford it, and it is my guess that there are darn few of them, if any, serving in the armed forces in Iraq.

One of the tradgedies of Bush's failed policy gamble has been that up to now, all the costs have been borne by our troops and their families and by our children and grandchildren upon whom the cost of this fiasco will rest. If the richest Americans started sharing the true costs of the war now, the plan developed by the elder statesmen of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group on ways to extract ourselves from this mess would not be simply ignored and there would be real impetus to start moving out of Iraq instead of Bush's current plan heading us deeper into this intractable morass.

John Freitag

South Strafford