Linda Bilmes

So this forced the fiscal committees in Congress, that's the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, to approve these taxes.

So they had to hold a lot of hearings about this.

And when you look back at the hearings in all these previous wars, Congress spent a lot more time grappling with, how are we going to pay for these wars?

significant percentage of their hearings were spent figuring this out.

And after 9-11, something changed.

So we cut taxes actually twice in 2001 and 2003 as we went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

We then cut taxes again during President Trump's first term in 2017.

And then, of course, again last year.

So the taxes have gone down at the same time that we had 20 years of increasing

war expenses.

Right.

I mean, so everything that we are spending now in Iran is just adding to our national debt.

Well, this is a really, really important question that you're asking about why is it that we completely shifted the way we pay for wars.

And I think there are three main reasons.

I mean, first of all, is the general dysfunction of the congressional budget process.

As everybody knows, having just lived through another year of shutdowns and almost shutdowns, the budgetary process is

has broken down to a large extent in a bipartisan way.

So from the military perspective, they kind of felt, well, they need to get this emergency money because they couldn't rely on Congress to appropriate funds.

Secondly, you had the situation through the 2000s and through most of the 20 years that we were in Afghanistan of historically very low interest rates.

So we could borrow at a very, very low rate.