Ways and Means

Carey Mott reviews Andrea Louise Campbell’s “Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes” and Ruth Braunstein’s “My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America.”

By Carey MottAugust 10, 2025

• Economics and Finance

• Politics

TAXES, WE’RE TOLD, are the price we pay for a civilized society. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s adage is ingrained in us as permanently as it’s etched into the facade of the Internal Revenue Service Building in Washington, DC. But the growing cost of civilization, over the last 25 years, has exceeded our ability to pay for it. Like many American consumers, the government has binged on credit, borrowing what it needs to plug large, persistent shortfalls.

Last year, for example, the United States borrowed as much as the entire Mexican economy produced in goods and services. This year, the US will borrow a sum equivalent to its entire defense budget just to service its old debts. As Jim Millstein, who served as the US government’s chief restructuring officer during the 2007–08 global financial crisis, put it in a recent interview: “We’re not even treading water; we’re now slowly sinking […] under a huge pile of debt.”

What Millstein was alluding to is the fact that the nation is poised to enter a “permanent” deficit by 2030. That means that every dollar collected by the Department of the Treasury will, by law, be earmarked for mandatory spending, such as debt servicing and entitlements like Social Security. After 2030, a president’s entire policy agenda will be funded by loans, exposing the United States to the vicissitudes of global markets in a new and potentially unforgiving way. Without defaulting on the nation’s $36 trillion debt, restructuring entitlements, or benefiting from some miraculous growth spurt, we are unlikely to see a surplus in this country again.

But statistics about the national debt sting a body politic immune to their venom. We’ve become accustomed to a peculiarly American fantasy: we’ll prevail because we always have. Failing that, our last bastion is a come-and-take-it mentality. A recent paper from the Federal Reserve showed that governments allied with the US military own the majority of our foreign debt. If we’re going down, it suggests, then we’re taking everyone with us.

Myths like these, used to justify and excuse our profligacy to other countries, embed certain attitudes about taxes within states, neighborhoods, and households. Andrea Louise Campbell’s new book Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes argues that many Americans fundamentally misunderstand taxpaying, and so actively vote against their own interests. These counterproductive attitudes are shaped, in part, by misinformation and disinformation. Surveys of American adults show financial literacy hovering around 50 percent, with no improvement over the last eight years.

This gap in understanding is not only a policy failure. To the extent that it’s intentional, or even simply ignored, it may also become a moral failure. Last year, Lee C. Buchheit, a lawyer involved in nearly every sovereign debt restructuring over the last 30 years, characterized mounting sovereign debt as an intergenerational sin.

“[A]version to permanently high levels of public debt was thought to be a moral imperative,” Buchheit said last year, one that imposed a duty “on each generation not to shackle its posterity with massive inherited debts.” Addressing policymakers in Sri Lanka—a country fresh out of an intense, two-and-a-half-year negotiation to reduce its overhanging debt—he used the United States as a cautionary tale of a profligate state that has shackled its posterity.

Framing public debt in moral terms used to be the purview of the American Right. But the gravity of our financial situation has pulled progressive lawmakers into deliberations with desperate conservatives, who have eyed a once-unthinkable tax on the rich. Now, it is the aggressors in our nation’s culture wars who have most successfully associated money with morals, as various calls to “defund” police, DEI initiatives, and other bogeymen have infused humdrum tax policy with the self-righteous bloodlust of a holy war. This is, to put it mildly, unusual.

In her new book My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America, Ruth Braunstein describes how the US government’s primary objective when introducing the nation’s first income tax was to frame taxpaying as something utterly mundane. Compliance might be higher, policymakers thought, if a tax filing was as routine as a morning shave. Democrats still present taxes this way, which (they think) makes it easier to increase them. Republicans cast tax collection as profane state overreach. But Braunstein, a sociologist at the University of Connecticut, reveals how, under certain conditions, the simple ritual of taxpaying can become something sacred. It is, after all, one of the very few rituals all Americans still share.

But as our collective public life frays, how do we, as individuals, understand this ritual? Both books suggest that our government may enjoy some immunity from the consequences of suboptimal fiscal policy, but we don’t. Our prevailing attitude toward taxes and our mounting debt result from a culture-bound syndrome: a potent injection of exceptionalism, boosted every two to four years by candidates promising bold policy agendas without clarifying who will pay for them. As I write this, US policymakers are struggling to finalize what may be the most consequential tax bill since the Reagan administration. The question for the public is whether we have let that conversation remain mundane, profaned, and ill-informed—and whether the rising price of civilization demands a more radical intervention.

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One of the consequences of a second Donald Trump term, and the peculiar timing of it—he was the first US president since 1892 to be reelected after a prior defeat—is that, although he will have served only eight years in office, he may end up shaping nearly two decades of American tax policy. Right now, a Republican-dominated Congress is negotiating his second tax bill. According to Congressional Budget Office estimates, by the time that bill expires, the national debt—the accumulation of the country’s yearly deficits—may be $32 trillion larger than when Trump first took office in 2016.

Of course, Trump wasn’t the only one to borrow over that time period. Joe Biden, who did not try to renegotiate Trump’s 2017 tax bill, was responsible for deficits incurred by Trump’s first term. Likewise, Trump’s second administration is still paying the bills of Biden’s administration. In the US, we take this continuum for granted. Elsewhere, leaders often try to repudiate their predecessor’s debts. Only under duress did the newly formed Soviet Union pay off tsarist debts. Default, though sometimes tempting, is unrealistic.

All that outstanding debt must be managed, and the United States is far from alone in how much it pays to do that. The world’s wealthiest countries are expected to borrow another $17 trillion this year as global debt interest costs sit at their highest levels since 2007. Troublingly, the interest costs are rising faster than growth rates. For many countries, that will mean sacrificing education, healthcare, or standards of living to pay for money borrowed earlier.

The US, too, will face such trade-offs, but what is peculiarly American is its citizens’ attitudes toward those trade-offs. For three decades, federal revenues have stuck around 17 to 18 percent of GDP, but expenses have increased, to a current level of 23 percent. The government will need to raise revenue, and soon, but it’s currently answering to an electorate that is largely confused or misinformed about taxes. American voters consistently claim that corporations and the wealthy should pay more. They say they favor progressive taxation—levying higher taxes on those with a greater ability to pay them. But come election day, they contradict themselves.

You might start, as Andrea Louise Campbell has, by considering what most self-interested American voters should want from tax policy: higher income taxes, which hit the wealthiest hardest, and higher estate taxes, which most Americans don’t pay at all. You’d expect them to vote for lower sales taxes, payroll taxes, and gas taxes, which, because they are flat rates that don’t adjust for income, burden low- and middle-income households the most. Instead, Americans appear to vote for the opposite.

This is even true among those who benefit most from government spending. A study of the 2024 elections showed that Trump won 63 percent of the vote in those counties most reliant on government transfer payments, where they account for more than 25 percent of all income. In those counties least reliant on transfers—accounting for 15 percent or less of total income—Harris won 56 percent of the vote. Clearly, the abstract goals of policymakers aren’t connecting to the everyday concerns of Americans. Something besides self-interest must be motivating their preferences.

Political ideology doesn’t explain it all. Although it’s true that Republicans are more likely to adopt anti-tax positions than Democrats, there are Republicans who aren’t opposed to taxes and Democrats who are opposed to taxes. Independents, perhaps unsurprisingly, can be the most tax-averse of them all.

Instead, Campbell finds that racial sentiment has the single largest influence on white Americans’ tax attitudes, with white taxpayers perceiving their tax dollars as aiding nonwhites—a resentful relationship dating to the post–Civil War era. Black and Brown communities, meanwhile, are generally wary of a coercive state, and often believe they are taxed unfairly. They aren’t wrong: governments typically overtax Black and Brown households relative to white households. This is in spite of a series of credits and deductions, known as expenditures, that aim to reduce taxes for low-wage workers, but which fail on several fronts.

Because direct government spending has become so fraught, Democrats often pursue social policy through these indirect tax expenditures. But this makes the system more complicated, so only those with time and money can untangle the web of expenditures they’re eligible for. (A laudable effort of the 2017 tax bill sought to make the primary tax forms so simple that they could fit on a postcard.) Even those who find the expenditures might not benefit from them. The rich also lobby for their own credits and deductions. Many forms of indirect spending, such as tax breaks for employer-provided benefits or deductions of mortgage interest, cater to white, affluent households. In total, expenditures amounted to $1.9 trillion in 2024, but a large share of it, Campbell says, was enjoyed by white Americans.

Despite their complexity and mixed results, expenditures remain the politically expedient alternative to direct spending. “[T]hey solve some social problem, which Democrats desire,” Campbell observes, “but do so by reducing tax revenues, to the satisfaction of Republicans.” And yet, come election day, Democrats don’t get the same credit that Republicans do. Taxpayers aren’t associating government benefits with tax expenditures. The abstract is not connecting to the everyday.

It’s not that Americans don’t know what they want. It’s that they don’t know how to enact their preferences within a complex system, about which information is regularly distorted. Ask Americans why they don’t like taxes, Campbell says, and they’ll offer reasons that are mostly derived from the efforts of the rich to get their own taxes reduced. By miming the preferences of the wealthiest taxpayers, middle-income Americans grant them reductions in capital gains, estate, and corporate taxes—even as they complain that rich Americans and corporations don’t pay their fair share.

The result is a tax system that is far less progressive than it appears. Federal taxes are less progressive than they used to be. State and local governments primarily fund themselves through sales taxes and excise taxes; their taxes are, on balance, regressive. Considered together, Campbell shows that each income quintile now pays nearly the same share of all taxes as it earns of all income. The top one percent may contribute a remarkable share of the country’s revenue, but when considered as a portion of their overall income, their tax burden isn’t much greater than anyone else’s.

This, Campbell argues, is unsurprising, since progressive tax systems are self-undermining. Of course the most well-resourced, most vocal group in society is going to try to reduce their tax burden. Most media coverage focuses on headline tax rates, which is often beside the point. For example, in spite of all the talk about income taxes, earned income is less important to the rich than unearned income—the interest and capital gains received on their savings and investments. Focusing on specific taxes rather than the tax system also leads to perverse policy outcomes. One unserious way to “close” the carried interest loophole, a tax policy that advantages financiers, is to lower the income tax so they’re on par; of course, this would only further advantage high-income earners. Americans can be forgiven for overlooking the complex, unsexy details of tax policy. At the same time, many might be surprised to learn they’ve helped create the complex, unequal system that exists.

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Ruth Braunstein, a religious studies scholar, also questions whether we’ve focused too hard on how much people are being taxed, rather than where their taxes are going and how they understand them. If policymakers find it difficult to raise taxes, it’s worth examining Americans’ attitudes towards them. Her “field guide” to tax attitudes explores the questions of how we make meaning from our taxpaying and how we might speak about taxes with moral clarity.

Taxpaying is, by nature, collective—an individual ritual we perform together, embedding us, and our money, in something larger than ourselves, over which we do not have full control. This, Braunstein says, is what freights it with moral value. At certain times—amid war, depression, or disaster—a staid Form 1040 can take on complex moral meanings about who we are and who we want to be.

That taxes are collective in a more literal sense—we all pay into one big pot of money that we have little control over—is part of the problem. Our majoritarian system makes it so that whoever wins the election becomes our president, whether or not we voted for them. We then fund that president’s agenda with our tax dollars, whether or not we like it. Taxes can be a sacrifice to take pride in, such as when we send aid to hurricane victims or fund medical treatments only a handful of us will ever benefit from. But they can just as often bring us shame, when they enable the government to strip others of their rights or deport a neighbor from the country. And there is no mechanism for us to distinguish whether we’re personally funding one or the other.

Through campaigns against collectivism, Republicans have succeeded in reviving an individualistic attitude toward taxes. Progressive taxation—the idea that those able to pay more should pay more—replaced a 19th-century “benefit principle of taxation,” in which our obligation to the state was limited to the benefits we personally received. It was a lopsided model, but one perhaps more aligned with the individualism of the early United States: I don’t live in a hurricane zone, I don’t need any advanced medications—why should I pay for that?

Some Republicans have taken this even further, attempting to delegitimize government revenue and expenses. A complex system leads to noncompliance, making it seem less legitimate than it really is. Those in the highest tax brackets resist by skirting the rules, slipping through loopholes, or evading taxes altogether. Some claim, as Trump did during a 2016 debate, that this “makes them smart.” But exceptions to the rules further delegitimize taxpaying. Law requires the IRS to audit all presidents’ tax returns. The IRS did not audit Trump’s until 2019; then, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, it reportedly assigned only one agent to audit a return that included 400 different entities.

Tax resistance is part of the country’s founding lore. Fed up with taxation without representation, Samuel Johnson ran for the position of Boston’s tax collector on the platform of not collecting any taxes at all. As David T. Beito shows in his 1989 book Taxpayers in Revolt: Tax Resistance During the Great Depression, the hardships of the 1930s, followed by the New Deal’s gargantuan federal spending, inspired a backlash against state and local government spending. The momentum generated by the tax revolts of the late 1970s, when homeowners supported a California initiative to limit property taxes, contributed to the election of the nation’s most tax-resistant president, Ronald Reagan.

The social contract is only valid if citizens consent to be taxed. Braunstein examines those who do not consent—anti-war, anti-abortion, and libertarian or anti-government activists, whose act of protest is not evading taxes to enrich themselves but resisting taxes on some moral basis, often because they lack control over how their tax dollars are spent. Outside of these fringe communities, Braunstein finds few who sacralize taxpaying today. After all, another religious scholar might reply, “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” One reading of Romans 13:1 is that you can honor the requirements of a government without embracing all it stands for. Jesus, for his part, seems to shrug off any moral dilemma: the coin’s got Caesar’s face on it, he seems to say, so why not give it to him? A tithe is optional. A tax is obligatory.

If only that were true. The Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian shows that those in the highest tax brackets are also the most mobile, with an entire map available to shop for favorable tax venues. Efforts to begin leveling the playing field and obviate venue-shopping, such as with a global minimum corporate tax, have so far failed. Opposition comes from small, often secluded nation-states that lack natural resource wealth and are loath to give up their only competitive advantage as a tax shelter. US tax resisters are stuck at home. Wealthy tax evaders can flee persecution of their low-tax beliefs—pious refugees wandering the cobbled streets of Monaco.

Today, it is the evasion of taxes, more than each individual’s personal obligation, that animates Americans—the perception, as Campbell found, of how funds are reallocated throughout society. For this reason, Democratic politicians have focused on the tax evasion of a new “oligarchy.” But when it comes to raising taxes, they keep taxpaying mundane. Without the collective exigencies of war, this is self-defeating. “[T]here is a cost,” Braunstein writes, “to routinizing and denying the moral salience of taxpaying.” We’ve set the bill to autopay, which “denies taxpayers the opportunity to reflect on their tax obligation, its fairness.” Democrats deny us the occasion to celebrate government when it does good work and hold it accountable when it fails.

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David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published novel The Pale King (2011) quotes an IRS manual addendum that states, “In the event of a nuclear attack, to guide the conduct of all IRS employees, operations will concentrate on collecting taxes which will produce the greatest revenue yields.” It may be true that the lengths the government will go to when collecting revenue can approach the absurd. Yet theories of a “shadow army” of IRS agents are stranger than fiction. “[T]he IRS thinks I owe this money,” a tax resister told Braunstein, “and they have the guns.”

More often, it is the protesters who actually pose the threat. Gordon Kahl, a self-proclaimed “Christian Patriot,” stopped paying his taxes and, in 1983, killed two federal marshals who attempted to arrest him on a tax-related charge. On the lam, he attempted to defend himself in a 16-page letter: “We are a conquered and occupied nation; conquered and occupied by the Jews, and their hundreds or maybe thousands of front organizations doing their un-Godly work.” Kahl counted the IRS among them.

Republicans haven’t discouraged these lurid images of gun-toting bean counters as they pursue their quixotic campaign: restoring fiscal discipline by hamstringing tax collection. Their paranoia betrays a deeply seeded distrust. Republicans did not try to simplify tax forms in 2017 to increase compliance but rather to make any exploitation by the state obvious to the average taxpayer.

This distrust is misplaced. Waste is sure to happen in a federal government that employs three million civilians, and another 1.3 million active-duty military, on a $6.8 trillion annual budget. To be sure, the government ought to be cut down. But, as Campbell writes, collecting taxes is a core government function—without which all other functions would be impossible. It’s an existential function, not an exploitative one.

As citizens in a democratic society, we are each charged with building a common life—for ourselves and for others. We build this, imperfectly, through social contracts. Taxpaying is one of those contracts. Developing a tax system that we agree is legitimate is the task for policymakers in Congress this year, and American voters in 2026. The truly radical act may not be evading taxes, nor resisting them, but claiming your tax dollars as a stake in something greater—that disaster relief, that life-saving medication. You did all this with a paper form, but something much more—“a sacred rite of citizenship,” as Braunstein says.

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Speaking in the Rose Garden in April, Trump observed that, “for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax, so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying the money necessary to run our government.” Trump was pitching the country on a de facto replacement for the income tax, tariffs, which are a regressive tax, imposing the greatest burden on those with the least ability to pay them. The burden of trade barriers gave 20th-century lawmakers the inspiration for the 16th Amendment, when tariffs were the government’s primary source of revenue. Today, the United States’ progressive income tax is the primary source, with the top one percent of income-earners contributing 42 percent of the country’s income tax revenue. It is this burden that explains why the president is so keen to reintroduce tariffs.

Frank Chodorov, the government’s right-wing spokesman during the McCarthy era, claimed that the betrayal of the US began in 1913 with the introduction of the income tax. Animosity toward the tax predates its actual enactment, and to rally Americans around taxpaying, the government had to assure them that the process would be simple, routine, even mundane. Before the war, taxes were highest at the state and local levels, where benefits were likely more obvious to the taxpayer. A marketing campaign, financed by the Treasury Department, tried to convince Americans that paying taxes to the federal government would be necessary but, above all, a privilege. Taxes for guns, taxes for ships, taxes for democracy, Donald Duck implored in movie theaters across the country: “Taxes to sink the Axis.”

Connecting taxes to the war effort proved effective—as Campbell shows, 85 percent of taxpayers in 1945 thought the federal income tax was a fair price to pay—because it underscored the nation’s collective goal and offered all Americans an equal stake in it. When it came to financing the war, John D. Rockefeller’s dollar was as good as yours. In 1939, fewer than four million Americans paid income tax. Five years later, that number was 40 million. By the end of the war, the income tax contributed 40 percent of the government’s revenue.

But the income tax rate has been on a steady downward march, so that the United States has one of the relatively lowest tax rates in the world (as a share of GDP). Given opposition to hiking income taxes, policymakers might instead raise rates on regressive taxes, such as the payroll tax or the sales tax, and possibly introduce a value-added tax (VAT), which is a flat (and therefore regressive) tax on goods and services. The US is relatively unusual for lacking one. Only some African and Persian countries lack a VAT, whereas in Europe, VATs raise revenue of around seven percent of GDP—nearly as much as personal income tax now generates in the United States.

Republicans actually proposed a new tax, a variant on the VAT, in 2016. But it failed to make the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) in 2017 because it was deemed too technocratic—and because Trump hates the VATs charged by other countries. Policymakers not only have to sell new taxes to the public but also to each other.

The lesson for Democrats is that they are mistaken in trying to raise revenue by masking it in mundaneness; this has allowed Republicans to succeed in casting tax collection as profane. Some prudent sacralization, Braunstein argues, could help “reinvigorate Americans’ commitment to putting their tax dollars to work solving collective challenges.” That Campbell finds in Americans a willingness to favor tax policies other than those that directly benefit themselves should offer hope that voters are willing to put their dollars toward a common cause. That they currently do so to the benefit of the wealthy emphasizes just how much education is needed around tax policy. (That said, some ignorance is helpful; for all their tax cutting, the TCJA’s architects also found clever, surreptitious ways to raise revenue that looked like tax cuts.)

One way to charge tax dollars with meaning is to pursue more structural earmarking, so that Americans can conceptualize where their money is going. Like pennies in different jars, tax dollars can be placed in different accounts with specific meanings, as the federal government did in World War II. This would entail more than sticking signs advertising the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law along newly paved US highways. Gas taxes, though particularly reviled by Republicans, are transparent: they are put into a trust fund that can only be used to repair highways and infrastructure. (They are largely insufficient; the gas tax has been 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993, when the price per gallon was $1.11.) Likewise, Social Security is a dedicated line on our tax forms; its visibility, and the tangible benefits one can imagine, makes the payroll tax less reviled than most.

Yet lawmakers would be wrong to think their effort to rally Americans around taxpaying offers them a free pass on raising revenue, since that would only be imposing our debts on future generations. Thomas Jefferson once wrote, on the topic of public debt, that “one generation is to another as one independent nation to another.” He meant that we cannot reasonably ask future Americans to pay for us. But Buchheit, the lawyer who advises financially distressed countries, believes there are few other options for the United States.

If we can’t “reprise the sin,” he says, shifting our burdens to our posterity, generation after generation, then future Americans will have to tax themselves to pay for our obligations. Between now and then, the government may inflate the debt away, intentionally or not. Growing our way out of debt is the plan of many an industry titan, but growth is also the desert mirage that lures a feeble debtor away from a painful but salubrious fiscal adjustment, or an acceptance of default. A default on American debt may seem attractive for its simple, declarative finality, but it’s also likely to trigger a global financial crisis.

Still, defaulting is not out of the question. This year, insuring holders of US debt against a default became as costly as it is for holders of Italian and Greek debt. Global investors are coming around to Buchheit’s view that reducing the nation’s debt will “require an almost unimaginable feat of fiscal sobriety.” The United States is unlikely to wean itself off slowly. More likely, it will be forced to go cold turkey, by “a calamity of some form,” of the sort Sri Lanka experienced in 2022, or Greece in 2010. Perhaps such a crisis is the correction needed. There may be only two certainties in life, but the wages of sin, they say, is death.

Or perhaps what’s killing us is exactly this constant cycle of near-crisis. If it’s true that our budget reflects our values as a nation, then framing the problem as an immediate funding need makes it that much more difficult to clarify or correct misunderstandings about our taxes, or to make meaning of them. When the Treasury Department must grasp for extraordinary accounting measures just to keep the country running, it’s impossible to discuss what public investment should entail, or to agree on what the role of the federal government should be. Always on the edge, it’s impossible to settle on what problems we wish to solve, or what questions we hope to answer. Thankfully, these books, and the research they ought to inspire, go some way toward asking those questions.