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If only it were all so simple!
“We must be willing to pay any price, and bear any burden, to provide the full care, support, and resources to every single veteran who served every single one of us.”
Enlisting Kennedyesque rhetoric, Beto O’Rourke’s campaign announced a presidential-sized plan to “honor our veterans’ service” by “cancel[ling] the blank check for endless war — by reinvest[ing] the savings” in veterans and Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) programs. Enlarging on this idea, O’Rourke proposed a progressive war tax on non-military households for every war the US fights, to be used to create new trust fund(s) for veterans’ health care.
Unlike the majority of comparable countries, in the US the VA is an entirely separate agency from the Department of Defense (DoD), with separate budgets, authorities, and missions. While in theory DoD may have some thoughts about its former members, its focus is on maximizing lethality now with the men, women, and materiel is has and needs. The monetary responsibility of caring for veterans (outside a small handful of programs) belongs to VA. DoD doesn’t have to weigh the cost of caring for future veterans against the cost of procuring tanks. However, as the Naval War College’s Lindsay P. Cohn recently pointed out, “most of the enthusiasm for a war tax is based on the belief that, if the public are made to pay a cost they associate directly with war, they’ll care/constrain the executive. There is little evidence that this works.” (What does seem to have an effect, however, is how both political and military leaders frame the causes and necessities (or not) for military actions.)
Nevertheless, O’Rourke’s suggestion that neither the Pentagon nor America’s political leadership fully accounts for what is the full cost of going to war on the men and women who wage our wars, and his further suggestion that a tax would bring home to Americans that fuller reality, is belied by the fact that, budget wise, the VA is not struggling. Between 2006-17, VA’s budget had a 94% increase in real monies, compared to DoD’s actual 4% drop. Over that same period, the Department of Education had a 6% drop in funding, while the Department of Labor had a real decrease of about 20%.
The recent growth of VA’s budget is even more striking when you take into account that it grew only 40% in the 26 years between 1980-2006. And the growth hasn’t stopped: President Trump’s proposed 2020 budget called for a 9.5% increase for VA funding over 2019, putting the VA budget at $216 billion. This increase in funding might be entirely warranted, but we simply don’t know — VA doesn’t measure outcomes on its programs, so there’s little data to show that is money well-spent, or not.
Not all veterans qualify for VA’s health care and other programs: VA serves around nine million veterans every year, out of the current population of 18-19 living veterans. For some perspective on the VA budget relative to the 15 other Cabinet-level agencies, check out the two Flourish graphs below. The first shows the federal budget authority 1980-2019, adjusted for inflation. The second, the budget projected out until 2024, not adjusted for inflation. (Note, VA didn’t become a Cabinet-level agency until 1988.)
Federal Budget by Agency, Adjusted for Inflation
https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/424084/
As for O’Rourke’s trust fund idea — Congress has tried the trust fund-for-veterans care idea in the past. The federal government’s first trust fund, in fact, was the Navy pension program, a special fund Congress established in 1799 to receive prize money (“booty”) from captured enemy and pirate ships, and to disburse those funds for pensions for sailors and seamen. John Cogan recounts the fascinating history in The High Cost of Good Intentions, of how this fund came to be overspent and in need of a bailout before it went bankrupt thanks to the Jarvis Act of 1837. With the Civil War came an influx of prize money one again, however, and the Navy pension fund was revived — but by 1868, Cogan reports, “General tax revenues became the permanent means of financing navy pensions, and the trust fund became an accounting fiction.” In other words, Congress has always found a large asset balance irresistible to spend, and not just on designated veterans.
Beto O’Rourke’s suggestion that neither the Pentagon nor America’s political leadership fully accounts for what is the full cost of going to war on the men and women who wage our wars, and his further suggestion that a tax would bring home to Americans that fuller reality, is belied by the fact that, budget wise, the VA is not struggling.
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