This week Beto O’Rourke proposed a war tax as part of his 2020 campaign platform. Whether or not you’re for Beto in the primary, this is an idea worth considering.
In 2015, Gustavo Flores-Macias and Sarah Kreps asked the following question in a paper titled “Borrowing Support for War: The Effect of War Finance on Public Attitudes Towards Conflict”: “How does the way states finance wars affect public support for conflict?”
Here’s how they looked for answers to this question, as well as some of their conclusions.
About the research
There are many factors at play that make this question about support for war a nontrivial one, including differences in government, types of conflict, and country-specific characteristics such as partisanship. This study considered democratic governments, as public support for war doesn’t matter in states with nondemocratic governments. To assess cross-nation differences such as differences in taxation level, the researchers focused on the United States (low levels of taxation) and the United Kingdom (high levels of taxation).
Previous research has shown that the type of war also matters. It’s been shown that individuals are more willing to bear financial burdens for interventions that are based on self-interest compared to those rationalized by the promotion of values. While there is less research on partisanship, conventional wisdom holds that party identification influences attitudes about economic issues. Individuals on the right may be more hostile to taxation, but also more open to war.
To assess support for war in relationship to taxation, a survey was conducted of 2,500 people in the U.S. and 2,122 people in the U.K. The baseline used was the existing form of payment for war in recent years in both countries (existing budget and debt) compared to what would happen if a war tax was introduced. Different scenarios were used to look at the effect on different types of war.
Adding a financial cost makes individuals less likely to support war
Results from the survey show that adding a war tax dropped support by an average 10 percentage points among Americans and 12 percentage points for among Britons. This drop persists across the different war scenarios. In a national-interest scenario, support drops by an average 8%. This drop rises to 9% in a hybrid-war scenario and 12% in a values scenario.
As the researchers report, this trend persists even in the case of a direct security threat:
The difference in support as a function of the method of war finance occurs even for direct security threats, such as the defense of a key ally, in which direct fiscal sacrifice might have become secondary to security benefits. In this case, the introduction of war taxes results in a swing from a slight majority of respondents supporting the war (51.7%) to a minority (43.6%)
The chart below illustrates these differences for the United States. A war tax has a significant impact across all three types of war evaluated in the survey.
A subsequent follow-up question was asked of U.S. respondents comparing financial cost to human cost. In this follow-up experiment, support dropped by 12% for taxes and 20% for casualties. This suggests that a war tax isn’t quite as significant as a human tax, but it still considerable.
Conclusions
The paper concludes that borrowing reduces public opposition to war:
Fifth, and most importantly, beyond the contribution of evaluating empirically the relationship between war finance and support for war, our findings have implications for understandings of democratic accountability in wartime. By reducing public opposition to war, borrowing in turn grants leaders greater latitude in wartime, as the deferred nature of debt means that the public has fewer incentives to check the costs of war.
Another way to say this is that if people see a direct link between a tax and war, they’re less likely to support a war. If we want to end our endless wars, we should consider a discrete tax that people have to pay for war directly.
David Akadjian is the author of The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy (ebook now available).