Priorities people, priorities

By Dave Anderson:

Budgets are moral documents as they are the practical implementation and prioritization of plans and values.

Ezra Klein notes where the priorities of the American elite lie:

As Annie Lowrey points out, Obey isn't trying to make the Iraq and Afghanistan wars deficit-neutral. He's not even trying to pay for the total 2010 spending on the two wars. The 1 percent surtax would fund one of the wars, for one year. And even that's proving too much. We're not just unwilling to pay for these wars. We're unwilling to pay for 6 percent of these wars. To put that number in context, the Senate health-care bill pays for 114 percent of itself. And people say that's not enough!

As Matt Yglesias comments, nobody seems to really think there are national interests at stake that are critical enough to be worth paying slightly higher taxes for. But if a war's not worth paying for, how can it be worth fighting? And if we don't pay for the war in the FY 2010 budget, we still need to pay back the loans."

On some level, I understand the congressional opposition. Taxes are unpopular. But this town is packed full of deficit hawks. Where are the editorial pages on this? Where's the Peterson Institute? David Walker? The Committee for a Responsible Budget? Politics might stop at the water's edge, but spending certainly doesn't, and nor does debt

War is fine, even when the basis is becoming disconnected from reality and there is minimal public support for the policy.  War is magic --- no one ever needs to pay for it.  Anything else is verboten.  Obama is sacrificing his political coalition on the altar of altering Afghanistan and his chance of being a domestically transformational president.