Those who worked on the 1968 presidential campaign of Eugene McCarthy (1916–2005) remember how frustrating and evasive he could be, how often he held back from full-throated positions and restricted himself to irony, hints, poems. But they were working for him because he had had the courage to run as an antiwar candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, against a sitting president with great political skill and a vengefully long memory, and because somehow, against all expectations, his campaign had led Lyndon Johnson not to run for reelection.
The same irony is on display in the piece included here, a satire prompted by McCarthy’s discovery of an IRS document called “A Design of an Emergency Tax System,” exploring how taxes might be collected in the event of thermonuclear war. Underneath his deceptively bland prose, McCarthy ridicules those shortsighted enough to imagine thermonuclear war as an event to which rational calculation can be applied, and reminds us that such calculations make nuclear catastrophe a little less unthinkable. An “Emergency Tax System” seems to him like something out of Dr. Strangelove (1964)—an absurdity on the way to doomsday. McCarthy was campaigning to regain his Minnesota Senate seat when he published his satire, on August 15, 1982. What other candidate for such an office has allowed himself or herself so indirect and enigmatic a commentary on a matter of life and death? (He was not returned to office.)
McCarthy grew up Catholic in Minnesota, excelled as an athlete, taught science, got a master’s in sociology at the University of Minnesota, and taught economics and education at St. John’s University, where he had been an undergraduate. He thought of becoming a monk but chose not to after a nine months’ novitiate. He became active in local politics, won election to the House of Representatives in 1948, and spent a decade or so in forthright opposition to Joseph McCarthy, then a senator from Wisconsin. His courage got him noticed, and he was elected to the Senate in 1958, junior senator to the Hubert Humphrey he later found himself so bitterly at odds with over the Vietnam War. McCarthy was an early and eloquent opponent of that war, and the natural choice to be the candidate of the “Dump Johnson” movement of 1968, whatever his inner reservations. Throngs of college students, I among them, got “clean for Gene”; though in the end the prowar Humphrey would win the nomination (while outside, in Grant Park, Allen Ginsberg chanted “Om” and thousands of demonstrators were beaten by police), the prowar Nixon would defeat Humphrey in the general election, and the war would go on.
AN axiom of long standing is that “nothing is more certain than death and taxes.” At the same time, whereas it is generally held that there is life after death, it has also been held that once an estate was settled, there would be no more taxes after death.
So taxpayers who looked forward or upward to the relief from taxes as one of the joys of the Hereafter must have been deeply disillusioned by a recent announcement from the Treasury Department.
In anticipation of a nuclear attack and the destruction, confusion, and near chaos that might follow, a senior Treasury official has prepared a plan “for collecting taxes even under those difficult conditions.” Even annihilation does not bring escape from the IRS.
The plan is called “A Design of an Emergency Tax System.” The “design’s” first concern is to perpetuate the Individual Income Tax system by securing the records on the basis of which taxes are determined. Taxes owed by those who are annihilated will be assessed as best they can be, the report states.
It would be a convenience to the IRS if the nuclear attack could be coordinated with the April 15 deadline (no pun intended) for income tax payments. If that date is not possible, perhaps the powers that be could manage it on or soon after one of the days on which quarterly payments of estimated taxes are scheduled.
The Treasury “design” does not make public its plans for the safety and survival of IRS agents. Possibly the agents may be lost, but in the short run—for five or six months after the attack—the computers, in some safe place, will continue the essential work of the IRS.
The “design” notes that nuclear war might be so disastrous that in addition to the destruction of millions of people, major industrial installations, and major population centers, it might even destroy the tax system. This, the IRS seems to believe, would be the most serious consequence of nuclear war. There are some experts in post-nuclear war survival who hold that along with cockroaches, the income tax system is likely to be among the few survivors of such war.
Taking no chances, however, the author of the “design” proposes a stand-by tax program in the form of a general sales tax to be applied at the point of purchase.
Such a tax, the author holds, would have two advantages—it would encourage savings and “aid in rebuilding the capital stock” of the country.
The Treasury expert has even set the percentage level for the tax: 20 percent. He says this should do it. That does not quite square with the Mutual Assured Destruction concept, developed by Robert McNamara as secretary of defense, which held that deterrence would occur at the prospect of the loss of 20 percent of the population and 50 percent of industrial capacity.
The “design” does not make clear who will collect the tax or whether it will be applied to the costs of mortician services, although in the immediate post-bombing period such goods and services would make up a major part of the gross national product.
The danger with a plan of this kind, a contingency plan, is not in its being there in anticipation of the emergency for which it was drafted. It is probably as good a plan as any that could be devised for conditions which no one can anticipate.
The danger lies in the fact that Treasury and the IRS may become attached to the plan to the point that without the nuclear war for which it was prepared, they may come to believe that the plan offers a better tax system than the one currently in place. They might offer it as a substitute, with the sustaining argument that apart from the merits of their tax program, it would be a good idea to have the emergency program established in advance of the emergency.
A contingency plan can be a destabilizing force, as those who conceived it may become more and more attached to it, and eager to test it, with or without an emergency.
The attempted takeover of a military government in Greece a few years ago by another military group is a recent example. The attempt was based on a contingency plan to take over the government if it were communist controlled—which this one was not.
The lesson is to beware of bureaucrats (or generals) bearing contingency plans. Possibly, under bureaucracy, you not only cannot take it with you, but you cannot even leave it behind.