Who pays for American democracy?

Chris Beem 
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University, I'm Chris Beem.

Candis Watts Smith 
I'm Candis Watts Smith.

Jenna Spinelle 
I'm Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. This week we are talking all about taxes and the role that they play in our democracy. Our guest is Vanessa Williamson, who is a senior fellow in government studies at Brookings, as well as a senior fellow at the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center. She's also the author of a fantastic book called "The Price of Democracy" that really tells the story of taxation in America through many pivotal points in American history, it sounds boring. I can assure you, it is not. There's a lot of really great storytelling in there, and you know this topic. It was so. First of all, it's the first time I think in 300 some odd episodes that we've ever talked about taxes on the show, but it's also I think of a special interest to me personally. My brother is a CPA. I was just talking to him about tax stuff last week, and he went off on like Schedule C and this, that, and the other, and all these things I should do. And my dad did tax preparation on the side when we were kids, so taxes have always sort of been in the back of my mind, and it was great to get this additional context from Vanessa, and hi to Dad and Nick. If you end up tuning into this episode because you're interested in the topic, it'll be the first time either of them have ever listened to Democracy Works.

Chris Beem 
You know, we only vote every two years, maybe with local more than that, but we pay taxes every year. And the other thing is that taxes is there's an old line that a budget is a moral document because it's it's spelling out where your values are, and that is a fundamentally democratic question. If you're gonna need money, then you're gonna need money because you have decided that these things are worth spending money on, whether that be schools or roads or military, or you know the the beagles in the airport, whatever it is, these things cost money, and so how you determine how government spends that money is inherently democratic, right? At least for us, right? the The first thing, the first power that is granted to Congress in the Constitution is raising. So it is it's at the core of these democratic questions.

Candis Watts Smith 
Well, we know that part of how we and why we even have a representative democracy is because people were charged taxes, and so they wanted to be able to have a say over what their money was going to be used for. We haven't talked about taxes specifically, but to your point, Chris, we have talked about budgets, we have talked about representation, and we've also talked about the administrative state. And so, I think this is a really great opportunity to talk about taxes directly, because all of those things are fueled by taxes and are, you know, there, there, that the conversation has been there in the background, and so it's we're lucky to have Vanessa Williamson just take it on more directly, so we can talk about the thing and not around the thing. The conversation around taxes across history often shows us times when people think that there's too much democracy in our democracy, and so a lot of the arguments that we have about taxes is about who gets a say, and when people are willing to act collectively to bring public goods, who gets access to those goods? But so there's that one thing I think that runs through, and we can start back at the Constitution. And I actually don't think that she overstates the role of taxes in slavery, because as we'll remember, the Constitution was a series of compromises, and slavery as a system was not on a docket. What was on the docket was the extent to which sustaining slavery would be made easy or difficult. So the three fifths compromise is shorthand, yes, because you will remember that the South wanted to count slave as one person for representation and zero property for taxes.

Candis Watts Smith 
So the three-fifths compromise becomes the federal ratio that's used in the Articles of Confederation, and then again adopted as precedent in the Constitution. But there are other things about taxes and slavery in the Constitution, and one has to do. The import tax, and so like someone could have said we're gonna tax the hell out of enslaved people, and that would make it really high and really expensive for you to do. But what they what did they do? They said we're gonna limit it to limit to $10 per head. So this is one compromise where they could have made that tax higher, and then that would have been a problem for the South. The second one is that there are no export taxes, and so then what that means is that the South depends on exports. They make all this stuff, they're enslaved labor, and then they export it, and there's no export taxes. And so again, that's another place where enslavers benefit from this compromised tax situation that's in the Constitution. So actually, I think that we see again and again how that's like one area where we see like race, racism, and taxes come you know, come together.

Candis Watts Smith 
Again after Reconstruction, we'll see it again after the Civil Rights Movement, and I think we'll talk more later as how we're seeing it again now. I think taxes are like that-that everyone has to participate, and then everyone gets a say. And some people don't want that; they want to be able to buy what they they want to be able to buy the best education for their kid. They want to be able to have guarded, gated neighborhoods where roads are smooth and whatever. They have high security. They want to be able to you know have their own worlds to themselves. But taxes means that everyone is going to get something. Everyone's going to benefit, and so I think through through these themes and what we see around taxes and the connection between taxes and democracy is that everyone pays some and everyone gets some. We're in a moment where there are many people who have way more than everyone else, and are using their way more to crack democratic systems, such as the media, as an example. And Vanessa talks more about that in the interview.

Chris Beem 
I think that's a very good place to stop for the interview. I'm because I just I'm like ready to go because I think that you've laid it all out, and these are very important and and incredibly timely questions, right? And so we're we're fortunate to have Vanessa here, and I'm you know looking forward to the interview.

Jenna Spinelle 
Yeah, let's get to it. Here is the interview with Vanessa Williamson. Vanessa Williamson, welcome to Democracy Works. Thanks for joining us today.

Vanessa Williamson 
Oh, I'm so glad to be here.

Jenna Spinelle 
So, in 300 or so episodes of this show, we've never talked about taxes, so thrilled to have you here for this conversation, and it's certainly an important topic and one with a lot of connections to democracy, which you have illuminated in your book and your related work. But before we get into all that, I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about how you became interested in this topic.

Vanessa Williamson 
I first realized that taxes had a rule beyond the sort of, you know, the boring part, right? Like, oh, there's a little charge on my receipt. There's I have to do paperwork at the end of the year. This kind of thing. When I was writing my first book on the Tea Party, the conservative movement in the early years of the Obama administration, and I was at an event, a tax day event in Boston, and a woman there, what Tea Party activist, was talking about. She was a gold star mother, which means that her son had died in Iraq, and she was talking about the sacrifice her son had made and that she had made. And then she transitioned seamlessly into talking about her taxes and how this was this unfair burden and this terrible sacrifice she had to make for no reason, and I just remember being rooted to the ground in that moment and thinking, taxes mean something else to people that it doesn't mean to me because I paid taxes entire life. I never once thought of it, and so particularly it can be irritating, but I never thought of it as some emotional event on the order of losing a child. And now I'm much older now, and I have two sons of my own, and I it makes even less sense to me now, right? So this was realization for me that that tax paying is really something more than the little pieces of paper that you have to fill out and the sort of more dry version of it, right? It really holds an emotional and a patriotic significance for people that I thought was worth exploring. So this went into all of that sort of thinking went into the Tea Party, and it is at the core of this book I've written more recently on the history of taxation in America.

Jenna Spinelle 
And that I think the the idea of the tax day events and that the Tea Party really gets to some of the the founding myth. About taxes, or how that is wrapped up in the founding of the American story, the the Boston Tea Party and the Whiskey Rebellion, I believe as well. The actual history of those events and their relationship to taxation is very different than the myth that I think is we've all come to know on some level as Americans that they're about. Just as you were saying, paying as little tax as possible, or taxes as a burden. I wonder if you could remind us of how the history actually goes in those situations. 

Vanessa Williamson 
So right. So most people think they know the story of the Boston Tea Party. In fact, the Tea Party, the conservative movement I just discussed, used it as a touchstone because they had a particular historical understanding, which, as it turns out, is completely wrong. So if the story you have in your mind involves a cold winter evening in Boston and artisans and mechanics boarding three ships in the harbor and taking out the tea and dumping it in the harbor, all of that is completely correct. That is exactly what happened. But what most people don't know is why. Why were the sort of working people of Boston so mad about tea? And of course, the thing that most people think it is the taxes were too high. No, in fact, they were mad that the taxes were too low. They were mad that the big corporation, the East India Company, which was deeply embedded with Parliament, was deemed too big to fail. Basically, right? It was this company that more or less ran India. It was inseparable from the colonial project. Somehow, despite the fact it was pillaging India, this company managed to get over its skis financially. Right, there was no speculation bubble. There was banking issues in Europe, and so they were cash poor. And Parliament did what governments do when their big corporate supporters get themselves in trouble, and they wanted to hand the East India Company along. They did that with a direct bailout. They also gave them a special tax break, and that tax break, which would have made tea cheaper in the colonies, right? Cut taxes on tea. That tax break is what led artisans and mechanics of Boston to commit in act civil disobedience, property discharge. Yeah, and it was at the time. It was no tea party the way we talk about it today. Now it's got a very cute name. It was called the destruction of the tea. Plenty of people from there didn't think it was a good idea because it was too radical, right? George Washington was skeptical of it. Benjamin Franklin was too, right? Because they had committed it. It's much more like the water protectors or other anti-corporate direct action work than we think of it, you know, because we think of it with this Q and A. But the reason they did it was because of this tax break that was supporting one particular company. And what Sam Adams said was that the tax break was evidence that this this measure was introductive of monopolies and therefore a danger to public. Right. So despite the fact that the Boston Tea Party is remembered as a sort of conservative touchstone, very much the opposite. If you look at the history, it is radical and it is anti-corporate. 

Jenna Spinelle 
Yeah, but there there has to be a thread there. I know that we could have a whole other conversation about the ways that the conservative movement takes these moments, these concepts, phrases, even, and completely does a 180 and makes them about something else, but there has to be a thread there or something for for them to be able to pull on to get to the more common misconception about the Boston Tea Party and its role in the larger vision of taxes. So, what is that? Do you think what were they able to glom onto to get to the Tea Party and that that event you attended that really kickstarted your interest in this work? 

Vanessa Williamson 
Yes, of course we're always going to have contestation over taxation. We have contestation over everything. We go to a local town and discover how much can provoke contestation. So it's not that taxes would ever, under any circumstance, be completely an easy topic, right? It's a hard topic. The economy is a hard topic. People are going to disagree, but there's a difference between the sort of contestation that's a more normal level contestation, where you're debating what policy is right, the rate should be this, or the rate should be that. Maybe we should tax this, not that. There's a difference between that and the kind of anti-tax politics we live in today, and that kind of politics is a recurring thread through our history. The kind of anti-tax politics we have now, where, for example, one major party has basically decided that taxation, at least for the rich, is always bad, right, and taxes should always go down. That kind of moralistic anti-tax rhetoric appears at various times in our history. It appears at times when there are fraction of wealthy elites who are concerned that a functioning democracy will endanger their power, and particularly will tax. And so, what you find is that is not all people by any stretch of the imagination. There is often a group of wealthy elites who, confronted by the possibility of having to pay tax rates determined by the majority, decide to undermine the processes, right? And so you see this in the earliest part of our history. Every single tax limitation that exists in our federal constitution was put there by slave owners to prevent the possibility of taxation to abolition, right? And so this was a really. Deeply held concern, people who enslave. They thought that even if the government limit the suffrage was limited to property, both property to white men in America do not own slaves, and so they thought that their property was danger, and their lifestyle was danger, and their masterhood was a danger, right? And so they wanted to ensure that if there was going to be this republic, there wasn't too much of democracy, right? And they did that two ways. First, they put in place limitations on taxation, including the direct tax clause, which I can describe in some detail if you're interested. Is was intended to help prevent taxation of slavery, and so all the tax limitations, and also, of course, far more famously, the three-bits clause, the overrepresentation of the Southern states to protect slaveholder interests. So we see that again and again. It starts there, and it goes all the way till today. Anti-democratic movements, spear the tip of the spear of an anti-democratic movement is the anti-tax movement. It always has been, and we've seen it just recently in the last couple of decades as well.

Jenna Spinelle 
Yeah, and we'll come back to some of those examples, I'm sure. But I I want to just unpack this this connection between taxes and democracy a little bit more. You just touched on it there, and I think it it makes a lot of sense once you hear it, but it might not be super intuitive, especially for people who have not spent a lot of time thinking about taxes beyond a few days in April every year. So you write that free countries are high tax countries, and you the first chapter or so of your book goes on at length about this this relationship between taxes and a healthy democracy. I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit more about that connection.

Vanessa Williamson 
Yeah, along with Boston Tea Part, another thing that I think is a common touchstone people have in their minds, and this is very funny. There's a Robin Hood cartoon that Disney did. It's got dancing foxes. It's a lovely little cartoon, and I think if you want, if you were to watch it, you would discover it is a really profound piece of anti-Tennis rhetoric. It's from the late 70s. It's air taxable, and so I think somewhere in people's minds is this idea that tyrants love taxes, right? Because that's what that story is about. There's an imaginary lion in King John who wants all the tax money, and Robin Hood is fighting against. But the reality, right, that we should not perhaps use dancing boxes as as our model of history. The reality is quite the opposite. Tyrants are very bad at raising taxes and do not like. And elected officials are very good at it because the thing that taxing does, because we typically tax ordinary things-it's buying, it's selling, it's owning-these are what we tax. So taxes fall in a wide swath of public, and it makes a ruler dependent on a wide swath of public, and that is not what tyrants like to do. Tyrants drastically prefer other kinds of revenue, the spoils of war. They like owning a gold mine, right? And people who have done some comparative politics in their time read kind of have heard the phrase resource curse, right? That some countries have what appears to be a resource curse, and that means that they are wealthy in some way; they have some mineral deposits or gold on these lines, but the country is poor and they are undemocratic, and so this was something that was studied for a long time by an economist. Like, how could these resources be such a curse? And it's actually the curse of low taxation, because if your ruler can sit there on his gold mine, or his mineral mine, and extract wealth that way. He does not have to think about what regular people want. Whereas, if you're trying to impose, let's say, a sales tax or a toll or income tax or property tax, suddenly you need to concern yourself with the fate of your people. You need to worry about whether their markets are affected. You need to worry about whether their houses are losing or gaining value. You need to worry about whether their incomes are going up or down. Right. So taxation makes rulers dependent on their people, and so and also once you become dependent on people that want to raise this tax, people have more of a say.

Jenna Spinelle 
Right. So you mentioned public education, and I believe that is through reconstruction. Really, that comes to be something that is funded through taxation. I think we see some of the the fear mongering that you talked about before come back in here as part of the efforts to dismantle reconstruction. So talk a little bit more about that piece of the story. How the idea that public education should be something that is funded through taxation comes in here.

Vanessa Williamson 
So, I talked a little bit about slave owners, federal taxation. They also this wasn't a states' rights issue. They also did not want there to be taxation in their own states, and they took similar steps in their own states to ensure that majority, again, the majority of white white men in their states did not own slaves. Others in the slave states are very rich. Governments, the people, because they're not doing it best, and that's public education, right? Starts growing in the north. They are not able. That even in Virginia, where Thomas Jefferson argued strongly in favor, beloved son of Virginia argued strongly in favor of qualification, couldn't get there either. They didn't want to spend the money because they didn't want to raise the taxes because taxes endangered their masterhood, their control, put the slaveholder class on a par with other people, and they just did not believe that was appropriate. They didn't that type of democracy. So the southern states are poor. They never built public education systems before the war. The deep south states had almost a public education system to speak of, and so after the Civil War, during the brief period of its radical reconstruction, which is the brief period of multiracial democracy in the American South, when the Northern, when the United States Army was defending men's right to vote and run for office, right. So for a brief period, places like South Carolina, majority Black state, you had a majority Black legislature, and so there's this window. And so what were these Reconstruction governments trying to do? There were two main things that freed people wanted. One, they wanted land. They wanted work themselves and the people who formerly enslaved, right? And this, of course, this is 40 acres of mules. They want land, and they want schools, right? Douglas calls literacy the freedom, and this was widely understood. Freed people were incredibly dedicated, and would remain incredibly dedicated during the Jim Crow period, the families of formerly enslaved people were incredibly dedicated to protecting and building a public school system against all odds. But they wanted schools. So if you want land, given the standard form, and you want schools, that's just taxes. Taxes are what's going to solve this problem, because there were the hope was okay. If we put a tax on land, it'll it'll hit those former enslavers, right? Because they're the ones who still own all this property, and we can use the money to build these schools, and they have to build them for black kids and for white kids, because there wasn't a public school system before, and it's a very expensive proposition. Mission of the Reconstruction moment was very much wrapped up the capacity of these states to tax. Yeah, upcountry country whites did not love plantation. They had just been obliged to fight a war for slavery, and they absolutely knew it. Right? It was rich man's war and a poor man's fight, as everyone said. They were the majority, but a substantial minority of upcountry whites were voting for Reconstruction governance. They were voting Republican, which was party party by Douglas, and so that was a nasty shock for the Confederates, and so they found a new tac, and the tactic was an anti-tax rhetoric that will sound 100% familiar to anyone who has been alive in the last 40 years, because they start talking about oh, government is corrupt, government benefits are going to unworthy, lazy people, a hardworking taxpayer is paying footing the bill for people who don't want to work, right? It's the welfare queen stuff, right? 100 years earlier, right? And it works, right? Helps the plantation owners rebuild alliances with poorer whites who had briefly, at least, contemplated living in a multiracial arm. It helps Confederates sell overthrowing democratically elected governments.

Vanessa Williamson 
It helps sell that in the North, where there were a lot newly rich industrialists thanks to that Civil War, who were themselves realizing that oh, this universal mail suffrage we have, say New York State, for example, is this really a good idea? Because now we have all these immigrants coming to the cities, and they're talking about things like unions, and we want to invest in public works, and this is we can't trust them. That right? That was maybe an error. And so what you find is that when the former Confederates reorganize themselves as taxpayers, right? They're like, oh, we accept the end of the war. 

Jenna Spinelle 
They call themselves the taxpayers, right? Yeah.

Vanessa Williamson 
So they had taxpayer leagues, they had taxpayer conventions, and this sold, right? It is startlingly reminiscent of the exact same reaction we had after our second Reconstruction, after the Civil Rights of the 1960s. The rhetoric that comes out of that is exactly the same thing, because suddenly when polity has expanded, when Black people are included and participating in our democracy, this rhetoric about certain people being undeserving finds an appeal, right? And so we see that happen both times that we've really tried to have a multiracial procedure in this.

Jenna Spinelle 
Yeah. So I want to talk as so as a show about democracy, we often talk about the Progressive Era and some of the the small D democratic reforms that came out of that period of time. But if I'm thinking back to your book, I don't remember seeing much, if anything, from that period of history. So I wonder if taxes had any role with some of the the pro democracy reforms that came out of that particular period of time.

Vanessa Williamson 

I mean, I started a little further back, but we'll get there. So, one of the reasons there were many reasons, but one of the reasons that the Norse wins the Civil War, right? We didn't have the generals; they all they were all from the South, basically. At least at first, and so what you get in 1894 and our modern income tax 20-year period is a state by state by state campaign to get our income tax, right? And so that goes all the way from the populace to the progressive era, and the income tax wins hands down across the West and across the Mountain West, across the Midwest, the states that had a lot of farmers, long income tax, and then in several states it passes by acclimation in the state legislatures. They don't even bother to vote for just tears, right? It was reported in in Oregon that they spent less time passing the income tax than choosing the guy who opens the door to the legislature. 

Vanessa Williamson 

It's a huge win. But now where is it going to lose? Of course, the industrial Northeast, right, where we got now these sort of robber barons, right, industrialists. One person whose name will be familiar, J.D. Rockefeller, did not love that income tax. Richest man in the world until quite recently. I could say with confidence he was the richest man who had ever lived, taking account of the economy back then and so forth. So he hated the income tax for reasons that we can all understand, but I think actually it's worth pointing out both because of course he would have to pay the income tax, he didn't want to pay the income tax, but of course he was still but enormously rich under any income tax system. So it was also I think a little bit that feeling that you are a titan of industry, and rather like the slaveholders before them, they did not feel that they should be beholden to a democratic polity, and paying their taxes, paying an income tax, would make them beholden to the democracy. To say it would say at the end of the day that the people have some control of the economy. It is you are not merely a titan of industry, a king or a god of your realm, right? That there is a power higher than you, and it is the law, and it is the state as defined. The law is determined by a democratic majority. So this was, I think, the more fundamentally opposition to an income tax. So J.D. Rockefeller has plenty of money to spend, and he spends a fair amount of it lobbying against the income tax. He has the same lawyers, in fact, some of the same lawyers who had or argued the case before the Supreme Court so effectively 20 years earlier, he has these lawyers as they send memos to every legislator and all, and repeatedly managed to prevent the impacts from passed. But then there's an election, and the economy's not doing so great, and those legislators get pushed out of office, and a lot of them came to believe. I talk about it at the time that it was the anger over the unwillingness to impose income tax led to these defeats, because it so obviously shifted the cost of government onto working people, right? Because the income tax was an alternative to the tariff, and the income tax would be based on ability to pay, and the tariff would be on based basic goods were more expensive, and you need to buy them. And of course, those basic goods cost very little for your JD Roth. They cost an awful lot if you're how the family in a tenement in New York City or a an upstate farmer who has to get his machinery repaired. Right. So the sort of selfishness, such a tremendous way of demanding that our economy run on the tariff, was something that really made people angry, especially when the economy was. And so, even in New York State, where J.D. Rockefeller could reasonably have presumed he had to veto power, even in New York State, they passed an income tax. Yeah, so state by state campaign, and that's why we have the income tax we have today. 

Jenna Spinelle 
I just want to close a little bit by talking about the IRS and its work and the people who work there, President Trump famously has avoided paying taxes for most, if not all, of his life. And I think his policies to reduce the, or his administration's policies, I should say, to reduce the IRS's capacity to do its work collecting taxes seem to fall right in line with that mentality. But I know you've spent time interviewing people who work for or maybe formerly worked for the IRS about how to reform that system, how they feel about the the work that they do. What did you learn there, and what's maybe how are you thinking about that, as we think about whatever a post-Trump world looks like, there might be an opportunity to make some changes to the IRS, or perhaps I don't want to say rebuild because maybe it doesn't have to go back to exactly what it was before, but create a different IRS moving forward.

Vanessa Williamson 
So just some statistics to people a sense of what's happened to the IRS. IRS has lost a quarter of its workforce and almost all of its senior leadership. Right, there were these huge cuts across the federal government that explained most of the workforce departures. Mistreatment of workers has been is really a catastrophe for our tax administration. And then, in addition to that, much of the leadership of the agency has left. Senior officials have repeatedly attempted to prevent, for example, the sharing of tax data with ICE, and they get pushed out or fired for trying to enforce the law. Right, your tax data is protected by multiple statutes, and those rules are stringent. There is absolutely no legal basis for the mass sharing of tax data with ICE, and they are trying very hard to do. That's the situation. That's what's happened to the IRS workforce. The implications are really serious, and I'm allowed to talk a little bit about the tax of this for now. Because the the IRS does two things. One, it does taxpayer service. Right? You want them to be someone when you call. You want that phone answered, and you want it to be answered by someone who knows something about taxation. That's what happens when you fund the IRS well. That the person there's someone there to answer it, and they know how to answer your question. Just this year, they cut so many people that they transferred 1,200 people out of HR and IT to answer phones. That guy doesn't know how to answer you. It is hard to take taxpayer calls. That is a hard job, right? And and they knew they'd run out of people, so they did to try and call numbers on the phone answering. So, so if you want service, someone to help you when you have a tax question, that's what one reason you need a month-long to IRS. You also want enforcement, unless you're unless you like to. If you're a person cheating on your taxes, I guess you don't want enforcement. Americans in general do not cheat on their taxes; they're quite reliable taxpayers. And if you would like the law to apply to everyone, including, for example, billionaires, millionaires, the lawyers and accountants to try and cheat the system. Then you also want the IRS to be well funded on its enforcements, right? And what they've done is drastically reduce the IRS workforce, which means that you're not going to get your questions answered, and they're certainly not going to do things like Direct File, which was an effort to create public tax preparation software, which was a step towards the thing that all other countries have, which is where the government does your taxes for you and sends it to you and says, "We think it's this. You can correct it if you think it's wrong, but we've done the math. Here it is. Everyone else does that. We don't do that, right? We because the tax lobby is very powerful, so that's why you have to do your taxes every year. So they can't build the kinds of things they were trying to build in the Biden administration to try and make it easy to pay your taxes and free and a public service, right? As it obviously should be, and then on the enforcement side, this is great banner opportunity for money launderers or drug cartels to avoid being the kind of scrutiny that comes from IRSCI, the criminal investigations unit that handles those kinds of cases, and it's a banner year. If you have capacity to put a bank account in Malta, then you're just going to be golden. So we're in a. So this is what's happened to our IRS, right? And I think that it's really important to recognize, right? Because the IRS has been decades. There was a brief. There was a brief period in the Biden administration where they actually tried to reinvest, and all of those efforts were Undermined immediately, but this is our tax agency, and the fact that the agency was so dramatically underfunded, so that it couldn't answer funds, so that it couldn't prosecute tax cheats, is part of that long anti-tax movement. Right, the demonization of the IRS as an agency is part of that long anti-tax movement that took its bloods off, right? 

Vanessa Williamson 
And it's now just a anti-democratic movement, and that's very clear, right? That long-term denigration of government, democratic denigration of capacity of a democratic government to serve the people, that attacks in the IRS have been a part of that from the beginning and remain the most prominent part of the anti-tax, right? That sort of constant effort to damage the tax agency, so that normal people get annoyed, right, and rich people get a tax break.

Jenna Spinelle 
What can people do beyond just obviously paying their taxes and paying what they owe as people who care about democracy and have just learned a lot about the ways that taxes connect to democracy, are there other things that that people can do to fight for taxes that that represent everyone and will ultimately lead to a healthier democracy?

Vanessa Williamson 
I think it is my hope. I think it's all of our hope that there's going to be an opportunity for a reconstruction, right? And I use that phrase advisedly because that's the scale of problem that we now face. The amount of damage I go to Washington D.C. The amount of damage that's been done to our federal government is incomparable. If it were done by a foreign power, we would be at war with them. So the situation is one that is extremely dire and extremely serious, and the only way forward is going to be if we make a positive case for a democratic movement, and that means a positive case for a well-funded democratic. And so, I think the thing that's on the sort of center-to-left side of the spectrum, it's still the case that you hear democratic officials offering tax breaks. This is what they think is really going to sell. They're going to, and the reality is, the tax rate you get is not going to pay for health insurance. Is it going to make college affordable? Certainly not, right? Is it going to rebuild the road outside? No. But I think that there is a kind of really condescending, fundamentally approach that a lot of politicians take to their constituents, where the only thing they can imagine doing is writing them a check, because they've lost faith in the capacity of government to work. And so, what I hope we can do, because we will miss our opportunity to rebuild the government if, when, pro-democracy forces are in power. They come up with a middle class tax cut. I'm sorry. I know it is terribly popular rhetoric, but it is not the thing that's going to get us the CDC. It's not going to get us the NIH. It's not going to get us food stamps back. We need money, right? We need large sums, public money, and so that, to me, is the place where the fight is going to be, right? Are we going to do something other than Republican light tax policy, or is someone actually going to stand the emancipatory Democratic power of taxation?

Jenna Spinelle 
We shall see, and maybe we'll have you back on to talk about it after the midterms or as we head into 2028. We will keep an eye on the tax beat here on Democracy Works. But Vanessa, thank you so much for your work. I really enjoyed your book, The Price of Democracy. There's so much in it that we didn't get to talk about today. I hope listeners will pick it up and check it out. We'll link to it in the show notes. But thank you so much for joining us today.

Vanessa Williamson 
Ah, thank you. This was fun.

Chris Beem 
So that was great and really interesting, and there's so much to chew on here, right? And like like I said, there's so much here that is directly connected to what's going on right now, and I don't know exactly where to start, but I I think what I want to I think what I want to at least lay out is that I there is data that show that Americans are nearly universally okay with paying taxes, and that is I have no doubt that's true. I just wonder how true it still is, and I'd love to see longitudinal data. Is it has that number stayed same or has it gone down or whatever? Because on the one hand, people some people know this. Not a lot of people know this, but I think taxes under Eisenhower the highest tax bracket was like 57 or 70% was enormously high, right? And now it's you know it's like 30% or 37. It's literally half of the highest, and I'm wondering. I don't think we could ever get anywhere close to that now, and I'm wondering why that is. And it seems to me like part of the reason is probably that the nation was just a different place then, right? 

Candis Watts Smith 
So I think, yeah, I think that's part of it. So we'll also remember that the lead up to World War II, we were also coming off of the New Deal. I mean that, right? And the New Deal was a major revision of what the government responsibility average people were, and how many people at that time may have prior to the Great Depression been like, oh, you just work hard and you get what you get, and then everyone is poor, like you know, or everyone's messed up in some shape, way, or form, and then it's like, oh, actually, the government does have a responsibility, and the New Deal creates these systems that we still use today, and that help people vastly. I mean, it helped with higher education, and it helped with jobs, and it helped with. I mean, we have like all of this stuff that came out of the New Deal, and so we also have a moment that's a we moment, and and I'll be clear that like not everyone benefited from the New Deal in the same way, but it's a big moment where there is a a re questioning of what the government's role is, and then we kind of move through history, and we can't forget that we have Reagan. I'm from the document, and I'm here to help. Are the like you know the scariest words that you can hear, and so I think some of it is not just this kind of self centeredness, but I do think that we live in a society that has come through a neoliberal moment where if you don't make it, no one's going to help you, and that's your

Chris Beem 
That's your fault and your responsibility.

 Candis Watts Smith 
That's right, and so now you better hold on resources you have because you have been told on a number of occasions that if you don't make it work for yourself, we are not going to come here to help. You know, there's been a fundamental change over time in how we relate to the government and how political elites have messaged what the government should and should not be used for, and the narrative, I think, that's dominant, is that you're in it for yourself.

Chris Beem 
We should bring this in for a landing, but I just want to make one more rant about about the condition of our government right now, and that is what she says about TurboTax, yes, and other tax, third party. Including, you know, Jenna's dad. It is a fact that that this kind of industry is rare in the first world. Most taxes come to you the same way your property taxes come to you. Here's what you owe. Here's what we're going to spend it on. If you want to fight us, here's the way to do it, but otherwise we will expect your check by X. Yes, and that is completely not how we do it with federal taxes. We could we could do exactly that. Matter of fact, the federal government knows how much tax you owe before you do all this filing, but because it's a multi-billion-dollar industry, the the lobbying is so strong that they we don't have to do that, that we don't do that, that we haven't changed the system, and that isn't a system is an evidence of a broken system of a democracy that is too beholden to lobbyists and not focus sufficiently on the well-being of the taxpayer, I don't know what.

Candis Watts Smith 
Yeah, we could have a system where the IRS makes it easy for you to pay taxes, and that would be one less bump in the road, right? That would increase people's faith in the system. I didn't, and it would be a potential for you know like a virtuous cycle, right? Yeah, you know, she says that when people feel represented, they're more willing to pay taxes to get the thing that they want, and over and over again. And so again, I think that situation with TurboTax and others, no disrespect towards.

Chris Beem 
Yeah, there's lots of them. They're just the biggest.

Candis Watts Smith 
That it's symptomatic of a democracy that is in need of an IV, some Percocet, something. It needs some rehabilitation. Maybe that's rehabilitation is the way.

Chris Beem 
Ok, let's choose our metaphor. No, I I think that's right. But I also think that as you were talking, and and I think this is you can tell me what you think of this, but I don't know we need to go any farther. But there are objectively a kind of back and forth through American history, well, with respect to a lot of issues, foreign policy, domestic policy, whatever. But you can see where, with the progressive movement that you mentioned, with Reconstruction, where there was this expansion of democracy, and then there's a contraction. And after Watergate, same thing. And so you know maybe we're at a moment where the the neoliberal, the rich versus the the poor, where that is kind of played out, as you say, and maybe we're looking at a a more democratic and unfairer moment in American history.

Candis Watts Smith 
We need to turn somewhere.

Chris Beem 
Yeah, amen.

 Candis Watts Smith 
That would be a good time,

Chris Beem 
And now would be an excellent time. Anyway, all right. Well, that was, you know, I don't know about you listeners, but we really had fun talking about this. It really is interesting, and it's important. So those are good things for a democracy podcast to talk about. Anyway, my name is Chris Beem.

Candis Watts Smith 
And I'm Candis Watts Smith for Democracy Works, and welcome Jenna's dad and Nick. Thanks for listening.

‍