Part of the reason the U.S. public accepts continuous war as normal is that we don’t realize how much we are paying for it. The idea of a war tax sounds politically crazy, but is is? It used to be pretty standard. Congress would declare war, ordinary people would be drafted and taxed, and people would generally be supportive but expect the war to end and things to go back to the way they were.

Until the Vietnam War, American presidents regularly introduced war taxes, seemingly less worried about offending the people than about financing the war. In some cases, the government had to work to elicit fiscal sacrifice, for example, with a pro-tax Disney cartoon in 1943 that touted “Taxes to Beat the Axis” during World War II. In most cases, the taxes did not actually offend the people…

In 2009, during debates about the Afghanistan surge, House Appropriations Committee Chair David Obey proposed a tax that would require homes with incomes between $30,000 and $150,000 to pay 1 percent on top of their existing taxes, and higher levels for the wealthier. Veterans of both Iraq and Afghanistan would be exempt: “We’re just trying to keep in the forefront what the financial costs are.”

Indeed, a study of the costs of these wars showed that the public is blissfully disconnected. In 2014, I surveyed 350 Americans and asked them to estimate the costs of the Afghanistan war to that point. Responses ranged from a million dollars to “probably $10 trillion. A lot more than we can afford.” The typical response was “I have no idea — $100 million?” The real answer at that point was $686 billion. Americans cannot make sense of such enormous figures. They can, however, make sense of their own budgets, which is why the connection with taxes is so much tighter, and why individuals become invested in the conduct of the war when war taxes are levied. As both Tilly and Smith observed, the visibility and intrusiveness of taxes are exactly what make individuals scrutinize the service for which the resources are being used. In the case of war, it means paying more scrupulous attention to its duration, goals, and cost.