Donald Duck and the War Tax

Spencer Ackerman offers us a 1943 cartoon in which Donald Duck argues the virtues of tax paying as a wartime, Axis-fighting measure:

Now I’m actually quite glad that we’re not subjected to that kind of propaganda today. But the cartoon does drive home the basic points that war costs money and things that cost money require taxes. Taxes were a hard sell then and they’re a hard sell now. But the way the sale was made in ’43 was to convince people that the war was worth the cost. These days, politicians seem to feel that the public would refuse to pay for the war if asked plainly. So instead of asking, they try to obscure the cost. It’s not really a tenable situation.