TAXES ARE INVESTMENTS, NOT PUNISHMENTS
Democrats are rightly disappointed with the down-ballot results from the November election. Absent an upset in Georgia in early January, Republicans will retain control of the Senate, just as the Democrats’ majority in the House shrinks.
Yet the news is not all grim. In Florida — a state won handily by Trump and that continues to elect such Republican Trump enablers as Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, and Ron DeSantis — the residents voted overwhelmingly to raise the minimum wage statewide to $15 per hour.
In my state of Arizona, which voted for Joe Biden and elected Democrat Mark Kelly to the Senate but kept the legislature in Republican hands, 60 percent of the electorate voted to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. Arizona residents also approved a proposition to tax the wealthy to provide more funds for public education — a measure that the Republicans in the state are now trying to overturn.
Meanwhile, the deeply red states of Idaho, Missouri, Nebraska, and Utah voted to expand Medicaid.
Why are red states passing progressive policies while still voting into office Republicans who oppose all of those policies? Why are they even willing to raise taxes to pay for those progressive policies, an action anathema to Republicans?
In an opinion piece in The New York Times, Bryce Covert identified one salient reason: People are willing to use higher taxes as a means of redistributing wealth when the money is used “for a specific and popular good, like early childhood education.” “People” here includes Republicans, who vote repeatedly against any general call for higher taxes and who oppose redistributing wealth as a form of socialism.
How can this be? It turns out that progressive policies like Medicare for All, free college tuition, and a wealth tax all poll well. Apparently, people like policies where they can foresee and see immediate positive results.
Since that seems to be the case, here’s an idea: Why not permit citizens when paying their taxes to earmark where their tax money is going?
The mechanics of this scheme seem simple enough. Income-tax forms could have a series of boxes that the filer could tick. The boxes would appear next to a category for funding — for example, education, with sub-boxes specifying pre-K, K-12, and higher education; military; infrastructure, again with sub-boxes for different funding areas; energy; welfare programs; and on down the line of possible areas of government spending. The final category would be “General Fund,” a category without specification.
In this way, taxpayers could feel some assurance that their tax dollars were going to areas of spending they supported. Peaceniks could rest easy that none of their money went to the Pentagon’s war machine, just as those wishing to increase America’s military might could earmark all of their tax dollars to that area.
Right now, we taxpayers can imagine that our dollars flow to areas that we support, but we can equally imagine that they flow to areas that we oppose. Because trust in government is now so low, our fears about where our money is going probably outweigh our hopes. If we could tick boxes to earmark our tax dollars, hope might then overtake our fear. Perhaps this scheme of earmarking tax dollars could reinvigorate our trust in government.
What if 90 percent of taxpayers ticked the boxes for military spending? Would those tax dollars therefore have to go to the military, leaving everything else underfunded? Congress decides our budgets, and no scheme of box ticking will alter that. Instead, the boxes are simply indicators to Congress of where Americans would like to see their money spent.
Perhaps this input might give Congress pause when members decide where to spend our money. Most likely it won’t. Congress already knows through polls what Americans favor. Ticked boxes won’t make a difference to them. Congress is already adept at ignoring what the public wants (See gun control legislation as one example.).
It seems, then, that through ticking boxes we are really back to imagining, not determining, where our money goes. The best that can be said about the box-ticking scheme is that it directs our imaginations more toward hope than fear.
Yet there is another benefit of having boxes to tick. However Congress decides on where to spend out tax dollars, we have indicated where we want our money spent. Our hopes have increased that our dollars will be spent in support of programs we value. Could such a scheme increase taxpayer compliance and shrink delinquency?
Maybe box-ticking can have that effect. But the real change we need to see is the realization that taxes are investments, not penalties.
Libertarians, those wayward cousins of conservatives, argue that taxation is theft. The government, threatening force and imprisonment, takes our money without our consent. That is the very definition of theft. Under this view, it doesn’t matter whether Congress follows precisely the percentages declared through box ticking. How the money is spent is irrelevant given how it is collected.
The libertarian wants to keep her money because “it is my money. I worked hard for it, and I want to keep what I have earned.” Many non-libertarians agree. Their income is their hard-earned money, and, second, they think that they pay sufficient taxes elsewhere.
But our libertarian and tax resisters misconstrue the real purpose of taxes. Paying taxes isn’t a punishment or a penalty. Taxes are investments in the social order.
Paying taxes isn’t a punishment or a penalty. Taxes are investments in the social order.
Nobody, libertarians included, earns a living, let alone makes a fortune, without the cooperation of and even participation in numerous social structures provided by the government — streets, sidewalks, sewage disposal, electricity, water, fire protection, law enforcement, courts, transportation systems, and the like. Reluctance and resistance to pay taxes are simply the failure to see the value of investing in our future, the value in the ongoing conduct of commerce, and the value in the nation’s ability to form treaties and alliances to safeguard and promote international cooperation in its many forms.
We live in a society that protects your property and your life and liberty, a society that educates fellow citizens and potential clients/customers for your goods or services, a society that provides means for persons to find and get to your goods or services, a society that establishes avenues for you to elect persons to further your interests and for you to file grievances if you have been wronged.
All of that is part of being a member of a society, the very system that has enabled you to earn your money. In other words, your ability to earn relies on a social context far greater than just you. To earn your fortune and, equally important, to spend your fortune, that social context is necessary and unavoidable.
To fail to pay taxes, to refuse to pay taxes, is a failure to acknowledge that context and to make you a free rider within it — that is, someone who wants the benefits but won’t pay the cost of having those benefits. Taxation is a means for all citizens to invest in the very conditions that enable us to earn money that we rightly call our own and to enable others as well to earn their own money.
So taxes are investments, not punishments. Permitting taxpayers to earmark their tax dollars for those areas of government spending that they support could move us all toward seeing that they were investing in society. What a difference that realization could make to the well being of our citizens and the development of our nation.
