Joseph J. Thorndike: Americans Don't Mind Taxes -- They Hate Tax Loopholes
[Joseph J. Thorndike is the director of the Tax History Project at Tax Analysts in Falls Church and the author of "Their Fair Share: Why Americans Tax the Rich," forthcoming in 2011.]
Americans hate taxes, right?
We vote for candidates who promise to cut them and punish candidates who pledge to raise them. We tell pollsters we don't want to pay them. And we teach our children that the nation was founded to resist them. From the Boston Tea Party to Shays's Rebellion to California's Proposition 13, we are a nation of tax revolters. Hand us a pitchfork, and we'll march on Washington -- just witness the "9/12 Taxpayer March" on Sunday on the Mall.
This is the history underlying today's battle over the Bush tax cuts, the economy and President Obama's complicated call for new business tax breaks even as the nation faces crippling budget deficits. Yet it's a history that doesn't quite meet the test of, well, history. Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed that "taxes are what we pay for civilized society," and for more than 200 years, Americans have been remarkably willing to pony up. It's not that we hate the financial inconvenience of paying taxes -- we hate the injustice of an unfair tax code. We've long agreed to pay the price for civilization. We just can't tolerate anyone looking for civilization on the cheap.
Consider the Boston Tea Party, the creation myth for today's anti-tax activists. It was a protest not against taxes but against tax loopholes. The colonists who dumped tea into Boston Harbor were objecting to a special tax exemption that Parliament had granted to the East India Company, a well-connected enterprise that in the early 1770s happened to be in dire need of a government bailout....
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Americans hate taxes, right?
We vote for candidates who promise to cut them and punish candidates who pledge to raise them. We tell pollsters we don't want to pay them. And we teach our children that the nation was founded to resist them. From the Boston Tea Party to Shays's Rebellion to California's Proposition 13, we are a nation of tax revolters. Hand us a pitchfork, and we'll march on Washington -- just witness the "9/12 Taxpayer March" on Sunday on the Mall.
This is the history underlying today's battle over the Bush tax cuts, the economy and President Obama's complicated call for new business tax breaks even as the nation faces crippling budget deficits. Yet it's a history that doesn't quite meet the test of, well, history. Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed that "taxes are what we pay for civilized society," and for more than 200 years, Americans have been remarkably willing to pony up. It's not that we hate the financial inconvenience of paying taxes -- we hate the injustice of an unfair tax code. We've long agreed to pay the price for civilization. We just can't tolerate anyone looking for civilization on the cheap.
Consider the Boston Tea Party, the creation myth for today's anti-tax activists. It was a protest not against taxes but against tax loopholes. The colonists who dumped tea into Boston Harbor were objecting to a special tax exemption that Parliament had granted to the East India Company, a well-connected enterprise that in the early 1770s happened to be in dire need of a government bailout....