plonk wrote:

BREAKING: Military Will Request $100B For Iraq Next Year, Murtha
Reveals

http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/07/murtha-100b/

During his response to President Bush this afternoon, Murtha revealed,
for the first time, that the Pentagon will ask for an additional $100
billion for operations in Iraq next year:

MURTHA: Twenty years it's going to take to settle this thing. The
American people is not going to put up with it; can't afford it. We
have spent $277 billion. That's what's been appropriated for this
operation. We have $50 billion sitting on the table right now in our
supplemental, or bridge fund we call it, in the Appropriations
Committee. They're going to ask for another $100 billion next year.


QUESTION: Can we come back to the $100 billion? You said that you
expect the military to ask for $100 billion. Where are you getting
that figure?

MURTHA: Where I get all my figures: the military.

This article linked from: http://www.antiwar.com/

Why should anyone be surprised that the military might request $100
billion for special operations in Iraq and Afghanistan next year? In
late 2003, $87 billion was requested and granted, for use in 2004.
This is just business as usual. (Does anyone have the 2004 budget
request handy?)

The Cato Institute, a famously *conservative* think tank, calculated
the subsidy to keep Mideast oil flowing at $50 billion/year, even
before 2001.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa428.pdf

Why aren't the NeoCons paying attention to that report, hmmm? Are they
no longer conservatives if the subject happens to be oil?

I've stated this many times, why not say it again? Gulf War II is not
a "special circumstance." It is not a one-time, fixed-cost
expenditure. It is a manifestation of a variable cost, which we will
keep paying until we Americans change our ways.

To encourage that change, I am in favor of collecting this $50 billion
("peace"-time level) to $150 billion/year (war-time level) in the form
of a fossil fuel tax. Does that sound outrageous? It wouldn't be as
bad as you might think. The United States consumes about 19 million
barrels of petroleum -- 798 million gallons -- per DAY.

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/TanyaAlbukh.shtml

This amounts to 291 billion gallons per year. So a $150 billion/year
tax would amount to $0.52/gallon. Not bad. Not only would we still
have much cheaper gasoline than the Europeans, we would not even reach
the price points we saw after Hurricane Katrina.

We might want to spread the tax burden onto natural gas as well, since
we are starting to import increasing amounts of it from impoverished
and politically-unstable countries.

Confining the idea to petroleum for the moment, I suggest we phase this
tax in at $0.10/gallon/year. Congressman Murtha's concern that we'll
drag this nonsense out for twenty years will be addressed rather
quickly. I predict that, after about four years, the public and their
elected officials will get serious about eliminating the hidden
military subsidy for Mideast petroleum.

In fairness, we should raise this tax to the level where it generates a
slight surplus against concurrent Mideast "special appropriations." We
have the older Mideast military debts which should also be paid off by
the gas tax, not charged to the public debt.

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