THE POWER TO DESTROY

An illuminating study of the antitax movement as retrogressive and historically racist.

No one likes to pay taxes. Yet, writes Graetz, a tax policy expert, despite the hype that Americans are overtaxed, the U.S. “is a low-tax country compared to other developed nations.” Of the 38 member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, only six levy less in tax than the U.S. does. As the author observes, the modern antitax movement coincides with the rise of the New Right in the 1970s. It was a fundamental tenet of neo-Birchers such as Howard Jarvis, the engineer of California’s tax revolt; and of the Reagan administration, one of whose architects, Lee Atwater, linked antitax precisely to racist dog whistling: You can’t use the N-word, he noted, but instead “all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In the 1980s, Graetz notes, the antitax movement became the glue that held together various parts of the Republican constituency, and especially evangelicals, who concocted the notion that taxes were evil. Meanwhile, Reagan, who campaigned on the vision of an imagined “welfare queen” who drove a Cadillac while gaming the system, lowered taxes on the rich at the expense of the poor. The pattern holds. As Graetz writes, it is modern GOP gospel to vilify the IRS, going so far in recent years as to attempt to defund the agency. Interestingly, he adds, nine of the ten states with the highest percentage of wealthy residents who pay no tax are Republican-leaning states. Yet the likelihood of things changing is slim: American voters don’t rank addressing inequality as a priority, because, Graetz ventures, “Americans want to become rich themselves.”

An accessible, searching look at the injustices built into the American way of taxation.