Especially if anyone’s serious about decarbonizing the military, things like manufacturing synthetic aviation fuel, moving logistics to electric vehicles, or finding alternatives to diesel generators at temporary bases are all liable to be hugely capital intensive upfront, even if many of them will have maintenance benefits.

The US for instance could pay for all of this and a lot more by simply ending the 2017 tax cuts, which by some estimates cost the government more each year than it spends on the the entire military, and which have had no economic impact distinguishable from random market noise.

Or maybe, the US could do something really crazy like bump capital gains from 15 percent to even Canada’s current 50 percent, or historical 75 percent.

Of your actually want to do something actually radical and not just obvious, tax stocks, private bonds, and securities, like they are physical assets with a federal sales tax when they charge hands. That might actually return the stock market into something more than a gambling by forcing investments to actively be investments if they want returns, and not just be dependent on line go up.

You cannot balance a govement buget without rasing govement income though taxes, and the idea of tax cuts paying for themselves has been widely discredited for decades, even if most neoliberals pretend otherwise.

Sorry if most of this comment turned out to be about budgeting, but cuting x to pay for unrelated y is incredibly absurd logic for a government. If x needs funding is dependent on x, it doesn’t stop need doing just becuse you don’t want to pay for it.