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Which means it won’t go anywhere.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-CT., said Tuesday that Congress should consider a special tax to pay for the nation’s war against terrorism. The Republicans and the Bush administration have tried to hide the costs of the war since the very beginning burying it in off-budget requests and refusing to include any money in their “official” budget that kept showing an improving fiscal situation. Even today, they included the money for 2007-2008, but nothing thereafter which makes their goal of eliminating the deficit a lot easier to do on paper. A special tax would make the American public think about the war every time that they have to pay it.

The problem is that special taxes to pay for things generally become permanent. Think of the telephone excise tax that was overturned last year that was designed to pay for the Spanish-American war. Generally, politicians have the spines of jellyfish and even if a tax was passed, it would be buried similarly to the telephone excise tax (how many people knew they were even paying it?).

I really don’t expect this proposal to go anywhere but with the cuts to social programs looming, and the Social Security/Medicare timebomb after that, we’ll need to fundamentally rethink how we fund the Federal government.

If you want to see where each dollar of taxes go, check out my post from last year detailing the percent of the budget going to various programs. You’ll see that there’s not much there to cut outside of defense and health spending.