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People Don’t Hate Taxes, They Hate Bad Taxes
What the most hated taxes in history can teach Donald Trump
For decades now, American politics has been predicated on one assumption: taxes are bad and voters hate them.
The “antitax movement,” as law professor Michael Graetz calls it, has its origins in 1970s conservatism, where activists devised a belief that cutting taxes, especially on wealthy “job creators,” would grow the economy so much that they’d increase government revenue. The tax cuts would have a second beneficial effect of “starving the beast,” forcing the federal government to shrink in size and power.
Politicians like Ronald Reagan switched American political messaging away from community-oriented discussions about building a better society with tax revenue and toward promises that individualistic voters could keep more of their money for themselves. In response, Democrats largely accepted the terms of the debate, except for occasionally threatening to raise taxes on the very wealthy. Neither party made a serious case that ordinary Americans should pay more in taxes for more services from the government.
Graetz makes a convincing case that the antitax movement’s arguments were wrong. Cutting taxes shrinks government revenues rather than raising them (as many conservatives fully…
