“Starve the beast.” “Read my lips.” “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
For more than a generation, and with the active encouragement of certain divisive figures such as Grover Norquist, those working inside the political arena have taken it as gospel that the American people are dead set against taxes. The fear is simple: that Democrats who propose to raise additional revenue will be framed as “tax-and-spend” liberals; that telling someone who is already struggling to shell out more to the government is political kryptonite.
Like death, taxes may be unavoidable—but the perceived wisdom has been that Americans will stop at almost nothing to minimize them, and there’s nothing more politically unwise than to be tagged as a Walter Mondale-style tax raiser. (For those too young to remember, Mondale lost 49 states to Ronald Reagan in 1984, and his tax plan was a major focus of the campaign).
There is no denying that no one takes joy in forking over a portion of their income for any reason—but, of course, we do it all the time. Americans buy goods and services every day. And we don’t invariably choose the cheapest option among what’s on the offer. Americans choose between the Cheesecake Factory and Burger King, between premium gas and regular unleaded, between a trip to the cinema and watching whatever they’re showing on TBS (probably The Shawshank Redemption, again).
It’s simply a fact of everyday existence that we each face disparate prices on similar but different products. And when asked to choose between them, we typically evaluate the options, not solely on cost, but on the value we’ll get from any given choice.
The same is true of taxes: People are often willing to move into jurisdictions with high property taxes in order to gain access to what they perceive to be higher-quality and better-resourced schools—not everyone is racing to live where the school boards run on a shoestring budget. Of course, many Americans are also moving to red states with low taxes because they don’t feel like high-tax blue jurisdictions offer a fair bang for buck. But that’s as much an indictment of blue-local governance as it is a reflection of American thriftiness.
This points to a different way of thinking about taxes, one that is much too underdiscussed: Are people getting real value for the financial contribution they’re making to the system?
This is the root of the problem, particularly for those of us who consider ourselves progressive: Too many Americans don’t believe the government offers them a good deal. Regardless of what they’re compelled to fork over to the IRS, their impression is that they’re paying too much for too little. And while that’s terrible news for those of us who believe that public authority is a necessary force in building a better society, reducing inequality, and pursuing social justice, it also offers a ray of hope.
Counterintuitively, the public’s growing resentment that government doesn’t deliver suggests that, rather than having a religious fervor for ever-lower taxes, voters would be willing to pay their fair share for higher-quality returns. And so rather than engage in a race to the bottom on taxes with Republicans, as Democrats such as Chris Van Hollen have proposed to do, we instead need to demonstrate that people are getting good value for their investment.
Recent Searchlight polling results bear this out. Yes, of course a majority of Americans say they pay too much in taxes. But by a margin of 43 percentage points, voters also say paying taxes is part of being a good citizen.
So why the discrepancy? By a 53-point margin, voters say they don’t trust the government to make good spending decisions with tax dollars. Put another way, much as Americans think they pay too much in taxes, they’re more concerned about whether what they pay is being expended in a useful way.
Perhaps even more revealing, when asked what would make them feel better about paying their taxes, even though they were not restricted to giving one answer, only 41% of respondents chose “paying less.” Meanwhile, 57% preferred the choice of “having a better sense of where my money went,” and, remarkably enough, Republicans (18 points) and Democrats (12 points) were both more likely to select this answer.
My interpretation: people object to paying taxes less out of principle than out of efficacy. If government worked well—if it delivered higher value—they wouldn’t object to the degree they do. So we should fix that.
There are, of course, other factors at play here: whether, for example, other people are paying their fair share of the nation’s burden. But all of this points to why the burgeoning effort to enhance what insiders call “state capacity” and what ordinary people likely think of as “making sure it doesn’t stink so bad to visit the DMV” is so important. The electorate’s (too frequently correct) assessment that government is incompetent is the foundation for its aversion to paying more.
This is part of a much broader challenge. For years, Democrats, fearful of abusive public authority, have sought (in the spirit of the legal scholar Nick Bagley) to impose procedural safeguards. And while curtailing the government’s propensity to make terrible mistakes, those procedural safeguards have worked to diminish the government’s ability to get things done.
Conservatives will continue to tag progressives as Mondale-style tax-and-spenders—and there’s no denying that those of us on the left and center-left do, in fact, believe that public authority should step in where the free market fails. Our counter shouldn’t be to deny what we believe—most Americans are on our side—but to demonstrate that we’re better suited to get Americans real value for their investment, and that our detractors are likely, through some combination of corruption and incompetence, to send those hard-earned dollars down the drain.
Rather than starve the beast, a better tomorrow demands that we make government work. Americans have had good reason to criticize the workings of the public sector—and those on the left and center-left should take those critiques seriously. But this nation has fixed these kinds of problems before—we’ve turned chaotic, incompetent, sclerotic institutions around.
This must be the essential subtext to conversations about tax policy. Rather than trying to sidestep reality altogether with ill-conceived anti-tax proposals, Washington’s policy agenda should get to the root of the reason Americans are so cynical about handing the taxman money they would otherwise invest on their own.