Vanessa S. Williamson, "The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History" (Basic Books, 2025)

Summary

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New Books Network: Vanessa S. Williamson on "The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History" (November 18, 2025)

Host: Deidre Woolard
Guest: Vanessa S. Williamson, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center
Book: The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History, Basic Books, 2025

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Overview

In this episode, Deidre Woolard interviews Vanessa S. Williamson about her new book, which explores the integral role of taxation in shaping American democracy. Williamson delves into how tax policy has historically determined citizenship, representation, power dynamics, wealth inequality, and the very structure of government. The conversation traces U.S. tax debates from the Boston Tea Party to contemporary battles over inequality and government legitimacy, emphasizing how taxation is not just about revenue, but about social contract, democracy, and the public good.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Origins of American Tax Politics: Boston Tea Party Myths

[03:09]

• Williamson debunks the common narrative: The Boston Tea Party was not a revolt against high taxes but against a corporate tax cut for the East India Company, which threatened local merchants and signified a dangerous government-corporate alliance.
  • "The artisans and mechanics of Boston were angry about a tax cut. It was a corporate tax cut to support the East India Company… And so that's the actual story of the Boston Tea Party." (A at 03:09)
• At the time, it was called “the destruction of the tea”—a radical act more akin to modern protests against corporate power.

2. Taxation and Representation: The Magna Carta Legacy

[05:29]

• Taxation is the trigger for representation. The Magna Carta (1215) first asserted that “a legitimate government requires the consent of the governed”—a precedent inherited by the American colonies.
• Colonists opposed not taxation itself, but taxation without representation:
  • “They really believed in that idea in Magna Carta, that taxation is legitimate… only if they consent through their representatives." (A at 05:29)
• Early Americans offered to raise their own taxes for Britain; the refusal of Parliament to allow local control drove the revolution.

3. Post-Revolution: War Debt, Inequality, and Shays’ Rebellion

[09:47]

• The cost of war led to the issuance of IOUs and bonds, which became concentrated in the hands of wealthy speculators like Abigail Adams.
• Efforts to repay war debt through heavy state taxation—without addressing rural money shortages—spurred Shays’ Rebellion, which highlighted the gap between east-coast elites and struggling farmers.
• This class conflict influenced the Constitution, leading to a stronger central government but also one insulated from direct democracy:
  • “The elites… are convinced that the people can’t be trusted to write tax laws for monetary policy. And that’s why our Constitution… was much more divorced from the will of the majority of the people." (A at 09:47)

4. Sectional Tensions: Taxation, Slavery, and the Constitution

[14:44]

• Southern states entrenched limits on federal taxation to protect slavery—the fear was that taxes could be used to end slavery by making it too costly.
• The infamous three-fifths and direct tax clauses, Williamson notes, were “explicitly to prevent emancipation, to prevent poor whites from recognizing their economic interest.”
• This early “divide and conquer” strategy kept poor southern whites aligned with elites.

5. Reconstruction: Taxation, Citizenship, and Racial Politics

[20:29]

• Radical Reconstruction brought unprecedented black political participation and attempts at building public goods—especially schools.
• Raising taxes to pay for these improvements became the rallying cry for white supremacist “redeemer” movements, forging an alliance between poor and rich southern whites through “taxpayer” identity:
  • “They reorganized themselves not just on a straightforward racial basis… but as taxpayers.” (A at 24:50)
• This rhetoric prefigured the 20th-century “welfare queen” trope, using the taxpayer’s burden to mask race and class motivations.

6. Industrialization and the Fight for the Income Tax

[27:46]

• In the late 19th century, high tariffs and wealth concentration drove demand for an income tax to shift the burden from the poor to the rich.
• The Gilded Age Supreme Court declared the income tax unconstitutional (1895), sparking a popular amendment campaign:
  • Rockefeller led lobbying against it, branding progressive taxation as democracy’s “most dangerous” tool.
  • “Progressive taxation is the fundamental threat that democracy poses to a minority. And by a minority they mean, of course, as usual, the rich." (A at 32:06)
• Popular sentiment for higher taxes on the wealthy was overwhelming.

7. World Wars, Patriotism, and Taxes as Civic Duty

[36:08]

• During WWII, the income tax transformed from a “class tax” to a “mass tax”:
  • Treasury ran massive campaigns (including Disney’s Donald Duck cartoons) to encourage voluntary compliance.
  • “It concludes with a message about how it’s taxes that are going to defeat the Axis… you can still do your part.” (A at 38:08)
• Taxpaying was framed as part of patriotic contribution—even becoming popular and viewed as fair.
• Memorable moment: Williamson describes Donald Duck’s confusion and ultimate pride in paying taxes (38:00).

8. The Retreat: Reaction to Civil Rights, Shrinking Corporate Taxes

[41:56]

• After the Civil Rights era, anti-tax rhetoric surged, often as a proxy for racial resentment. Public investments that had excluded black Americans became “burdensome” when extended to all.
• Corporate taxes fell steeply as individual taxes held steady or rose:
  • “In the early 1950s, the government’s receiving nearly as much from corporate tax as from individual income tax. By 1970, that really starts to shift.” (C at 41:56)
• Commensurately, wealth inequality grew.

9. The Modern Republican Party and Anti-Tax Orthodoxy

[43:20]

• Reagan’s administration marks the transformation of the GOP into the party of dogmatic anti-tax policies—not just for balancing budgets, but as a rejection of government’s legitimacy:
  • “The anti-tax rhetoric becomes explicitly and ever more sort of knee-jerk… and that ratchet effect has huge implications for deficits…” (A at 43:20)
• This stance is fundamentally anti-democratic, as it “always at the core is an anti-democratic rhetoric… the implication is always that we can’t trust the people with power over the economy.” (A at 46:57)

10. The Future: Can Technology and Political Will Rebuild Tax Fairness?

[47:33]

• Williamson applauds initiatives like direct file (“free public tax preparation”), which would simplify and dignify tax compliance but laments its recent defunding.
• She advocates a return to steep, progressive taxation on both income and wealth, echoing Thomas Paine:
  • “Tom Paine… laid out a progressive tax on the income from wealth with a top rate of 100%… His idea was that a certain level of wealth was incompatible with a republic.” (A at 48:45)
• Most crucially, Williamson calls for politicians to reclaim the narrative that government and taxes are worth it:
  • “Taxation should not be understood as a punishment for doing something wrong. Taxation is everyone’s contribution to the public good.” (A at 50:23)
  • The left’s failure is not in taxing the rich but in abandoning the rhetoric that encourages all citizens to contribute and find value in government.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the myth of the Boston Tea Party:
  “Most people would think… the Boston Tea Party was because of high taxes… that's completely wrong. It's exactly backwards. The artisans and mechanics of Boston were angry about a tax cut.” (A at 03:09)

• On the constitutional roots of U.S. tax tension:
  “Right at the heart of the sort of American story is whether we believe that the people can be trusted to tax.” (A at 13:44)

• On Reconstruction’s radicalism:
  “It is the first effort to create multiracial democracy in America…. It is a more profound revolution fundamentally than the American Revolution was.” (A at 21:20)

• On the rise of anti-tax rhetoric:
  “They reorganized themselves… as taxpayers. They tried first to defeat radical reconstruction by appealing to poor whites on racial basis alone. And this was somewhat less successful… but as taxpayers, it was more effective.” (A at 24:50)

• On democratic support for equitable taxation:
  “Strong majority of Americans… would have agreed that the rich needed to pay more than 2 percent. The income tax is hugely popular.” (A at 33:30)

• On the need to reclaim public legitimacy for taxes:
  “Taxation should not be understood as a punishment for doing something wrong. Taxation is everyone’s contribution to the public good… If we don't find that rhetoric again, I don't think we can rebuild our fiscal system. And in some sense, I think it means we can't rebuild our democracy.” (A at 50:23)

• On the erosion of public tax discourse:
  “People like and know they pay the payroll tax that funds Social Security and Medicare and the sales tax. The real failure is a willingness to say to the American people that government is worth it… and we’re going to ask you to pay for it.” (A at 50:30)

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Important Timestamps

• [03:09] — Rethinking the Boston Tea Party: Not a protest against high taxes, but corporate favoritism
• [05:29] — Magna Carta, consent, and the birth of “no taxation without representation”
• [09:47] — Post-Revolution tax debts, Shays’ Rebellion, and the Constitutional response
• [14:44] — The South, taxation, slavery, and Constitutional compromise
• [20:29] — Radical Reconstruction: Black citizenship, public goods, and tax backlash
• [27:46] — Rise and constitutional fight over the income tax; Rockefeller’s opposition
• [36:08] — WWII: Patriotic mass taxation and civic participation (“Donald Duck” moment)
• [41:56] — Corporate share of tax revenue plummets, rising inequality
• [43:20] — Reagan era: Shift to anti-tax Republicanism and distrust in government
• [47:33] — Technological and rhetorical challenges in modern tax policy
• [50:23] — Closing argument: taxing as civic virtue and precondition for democracy

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Conclusion

Vanessa Williamson’s The Price of Democracy digs deep into how debates over taxation have always been central to the American story—not just as matters of economics, but as questions of representation, identity, and the limits of democracy itself. The interview highlights the misunderstanding, misuse, and enduring power of tax politics in shaping who counts, who pays, and who benefits in the U.S.—leaving listeners with a challenge to reconsider the civic meaning of taxes and to fight for a fair, democratic tax system.

Transcript

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[B]

Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[C]

Hello, I'm Deidre Woolard with the New Books Network Economics Channel. I'm talking today with Vanessa Williamson, author of a new book, the Price of Democracy, the Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History. She's a senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and a senior Fellow at the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center. Welcome.

[A]

Oh, thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.

[C]

So, obviously, you know a lot about tax policy. You studied it for a long time. Why was now the time for you to write this book?

[A]

Well, you know, I think I've actually, now was not the time to start writing this book. It was about seven years ago. And I think I. What drew me to it was just the realization I have a bunch of questions about what taxes do for our politics and sort of why our politics are the way they are around taxation. And originally, the plan for the book was to have a sort of historical introductory chapter or two and then move into sort of like a sort of direct conversation about those. The sort of political contestation over taxes today. And the beginning two chapters just got longer and longer over time. And then I finally realized that was just the book I was writing. I was writing a history of taxation and democracy in America. So I really. I fell into the project very much.

[C]

I like that. And I love that you went so deep in those early chapters, because I think there's a lot of things that people don't know. So you start at the beginning of taxation in the U.S. you take us right to the Boston Tea Party and the origins of taxation without representation. I found this really interesting because I thought some of it was very different than what we're all taught as the basics in, like, high school history class. So tell us a little bit about that.

[A]

So I think most people would think that they knew the story of the Boston Tea Party. You know, when mechanics and artisans on a cold winter night went to Boston harbor and clamored aboard three ships and threw thousands of pounds of tea into Boston Harbor. If you ask people why people did that, they would probably tell you that it was because of high taxes. Americans were mad about high taxes, but that's completely wrong. It's exactly backwards. The artisans and mechanics of Boston were angry about a tax cut. It was a corporate tax cut to support the East India Company, which was a corporation basically deemed too big to fail by Parliament. Very, very wrapped up in parliamentary coffers, shall we say. And so the East India Company was struggling in India at the time, and so Parliament decided to give them a bailout. And the bailout included a bunch of different provisions, but one of them was a special tax break where they could sell their tea in America tax free. And that was in the words of Sam Adams, who was one of the organizers of the Sons of Liberty and helped spearhead this among other direct action events in Boston around this time. He thought that the tax break was introductive of monopolies. That is to say, it was too close of a relationship between a corporation and the government, and it was a threat to individual liberty. And so that's the actual story of the Boston Tea Party. It was a piece of direct action, property destruction. It was not called the Boston Tea Party, which is a kind of cute name. At the time it was known as the destruction. Destruction of the tea. And I think that phrase gives you more of a sense of how it was perceived at the time as a very radical act. Something maybe more like the way people would think about blocking an oil pipeline today, rather than the sort of conservative resonance that it has, I think for most Americans today, which is based on a real fundamental misunderstanding.

[C]

Well, I find it fascinating too that corporations and monopolies are an issue all that way the whole way through this and we have not figured it out yet.

[A]

No, I'm afraid that remains a problem to this very day. I'm sure that Lina Khan and Sam Adams would have a few words to share with one another.

[C]

Right, absolutely. The other thing you bring up that I think in the early chapters that's interesting is this idea of taxation as this two way street that citizens, they pay the tax, but they also have the right therefore to kind of get their money's worth. And that creates a bit of tension in the early United States.

[A]

Yeah, that's exactly right. So I think if we could go back even further, taxation really provokes representation. Right. If you look at the Magna carta back in 1215, this is one of the very first times the argument is made that a legitimate government requires the consent of the governed. This was a failed peace treaty between King John, who taxed rather heavily, and some rebellious barons. And so it said that for extraordinary taxation purposes, King John would have to get the consent of the realm, which was meant to be achie achieved by bringing the various lords together and having them debate and decide whether this tax was appropriate. Now, it didn't work in 1215. It took hundreds of years to actually put such a policy in place. But when England did develop the capacity to have a system of authorization of consent for taxation that became known as Parliament. And it was the very origin of representation in the British Isles. And what's interesting is that that experience did not stop taxation. You might think, ah, now there's this parliament that's going to stop taxation from happening quite the reverse. The process of achieving consent made it easier to raise taxes. And the fact that England had this much more powerful fiscal capacity is one of the reasons why England was such a powerful military force and defeated France so regularly. Where they had nominally a king with absolute power but no system of meaningful consent, the States General was very weak and so they didn't have a meaningful system of consent to taxation. And so not much money was raised. So that's the real basis of the sort of thinking about taxation in the United States. It was very much wrapped up in the idea of Magna Carta and consent. And so what Americans are mad about in the colonial period is not the idea of taxation. Actually, any number of colonies wrote to Parliament when Parliament did try and impose taxes like the Stamp act, and said, can you just tell us how much revenue you need and we'll do the taxing and we'll send you it, it's fine, but let us do the taxing both, because we actually know how to do that effectively. We understand our local economies. You know, at one point, the Prime Grenville actually wrote to some of his friends in America, asking them what documents they had, like what documents do you use so we can put a stamp tax on it? Which gives you a sense that they really weren't that familiar with the American context. So the American colonies, it wasn't that they were opposed to actually giving revenue to Britain per se, but what they didn't want was a tax directly applied on them by Parliament, where they had no representation. They really believed in that idea in Magna Carta, that taxation is legitimate. You can take the fruits of someone's labor through taxation only if they consent through their representatives. And so that was the way the taxation formed this basis in early America. Now, the tension you mentioned came from something very specific, and it's quite hard for modern people to think about, but there wasn't enough money. And that's not to say there wasn't enough value. Obviously it was a very rich country, the United States, from the very beginning. I mean, tons of profitable farmland and all the rest of it, but there just wasn't literally enough coins to pay the taxes with. And so the money shortages were annoying in other ways. But you could have account books with your neighbors. I mean, these are small farmers. You didn't really need money that often, but you did need it tax time. And one of the ways that the Stamp act was particularly ill suited to the American context is that they wanted the money paid in what was called species coins. Americans just didn't have any. And so this is one of the. At various points, they wanted to pay in produce rather than in coins, because this didn't exist in the back country of America. There were no money. So this problem is part of what sparks, of course, the American Revolution. It doesn't go away. The shortage of money doesn't go away magically. In fact, it gets much worse when America is an independent nation. And so taxes continue to be a problem Simply because there was no medium in which to pay. And so that's what you see all through the early American period.

[C]

Yeah, absolutely. And I find it interesting after that period, so you get through the American Revolution and war is expensive. So you've got all of these bonds. One of the things you talk about is how early wealth inequality starts to speed up in the US and some of that is these, this debt, these bonds that are then able to be bought by other people at, you know, essentially pennies on the dollar. And that sort of leads to unfairness of taxation because you have these people that have this bond wealth, but they're not the ones being taxed.

[A]

Yeah, that's exactly right. So, yeah, we all wars are fought on debt. That is just how wars are fought, fundamentally. But the United States, when we had a revolution, we absolutely wrote a lot of IOUs, all kinds of different script. The different states, what states had different monies. Federal government had different monies. Congress did not actually have the power to tax under the Articles of Confederation. So they're asking for requisitions from the states, which is basically, oh, please send us some money. And so this was not the world's greatest fiscal system that we're operating with. But as the states are trying to raise money to pay back this debt, all this debt, it seems. Debt papers, right. All this debt seems like it's not going to get paid. And for average people who had debt, because maybe the army had commandeered a cow or they had served and this was their pay, they had these different, different forms of paper that was. It wasn't real money, it was an iou. Well, they had to sell it right away. Often soldiers sold them to get home to buy a new set of clothes to get home from the war. And so all that paper money consolidates in the hands of very, very few people huge amounts of this nominal wealth, because only a few people had the money to speculate. And it tended to be sort of wealthy merchants in the cities. And so now they're sitting on all this wealth. One of them is actually Abigail Adams, interestingly enough. She was a very canny investor, and her husband, John Adams, always wanted to buy land. And she was like, you know, there's actually this, this new thing we can invest in that's even more profitable than land, and it's tax free. And so she convinces him because, you know, obviously this is a long time ago, and she did not have direct control over the finances of the family, but she often in practice did run the finances of her Family, because John was off fighting revolution. And so they invest very heavily in this, in this war debt. And the speculation is pretty simple. You're buying for penny on sell the dollar. If the government ever comes through, they don't even have to pay the full amount. Even if they pay a reasonable amount, then you're going to come up with this huge profit. And in the meantime, you're going to be getting interest on the paper. The nominal value of this debt. So it's worth a dollar. You pay 30 cents and you get 6%. Oh, it's 18% interest for you because you only paid a third of the cost right upfront. So, yeah. So this is an incredible bargain. And all of that wealth is held basically tax free. So it's a huge deal and only a few people have it. So now the states are like, okay, we have to pay back all this debt. How are we going to do it? You could print paper money. You could. There are a bunch of other things you could do. You can have very long payment schedule as well. Massachusetts in particular goes the other way because a lot of merchants had a lot of power in their state legislature and they impose very heavy taxation and they basically do what parliament did. They completely neglect the fact that their rural friends out west don't have any money to pay these taxes with, and they start Shays rebellion. So this is a rebellion that's very much for the people fighting it. It was basically a continuation of the American Revolution because they're still fighting about the same thing, that we don't have any money to pay the taxes you want us to pay. Can you take farm goods? And people are like, no, no, you got to find silver coins that you simply don't have. Right. And so Shays rebellion happens and this is the spark for our Constitution. Right. I think in American history, we tend to go directly from the fun of the revolution to the Constitution. And we sort of skip the 10 years between. A terrible depression happens then. And there are all these fights over taxation and what it means for our constitution that we still live under today, that Shays rebellion happens right before these angry farmers wanting a better way to pay their taxes than with money they don't have. Well, the people who arrive to write this constitution arrive with one diagnosis in mind. They're like, there is too much democracy. These poor farmers. It's not that there's a shortage of money. It's that these people are lazy and the spirit of the revolution has died in their hearts and they're enamored of luxury. Was A very big idea that the people who said that they didn't have money, well, all their daughters are learning dancing from a French dancing master is one angry letter to the editor. I remember for one of the newspapers of the time. Well, so the elites basically arrive to write this Constitution, and they are convinced that the people can't be trusted to write tax laws for monetary policy. And that's why our Constitution, which absolutely was completely necessary in the sense if we needed a much stronger central government, it wasn't just stronger, it was much more divorced from the will of the majority of the people. So you'd have things like senators with very long terms, a Senate that only a third of ever comes up for election in a given year. You have a president with a longer term. Hamilton wanted the president to be appointed for life. So you have all these measures that are under debate to make to insulate the federal leadership, to give them the power to tax and to write and to man monetary policy and to give them powers and then to insulate them from the will of the people. And that's the Constitution we still live under today. So there's, I think, right at the heart of the sort of American story is whether we believe that the people can be trusted to tax what.

[C]

Another thing that comes up during that constitutional fight is that tension between the Northern and Southern states over representation and taxation. And it gets sort of, I would feel like half resolved maybe during the Constitution process, but it keeps coming up over and over again until the Civil War. So what goes into that?

[A]

So the first part of the story is this idea that we're going to give the federal government strong powers. That's what Hamilton wants. He wants a strong government that can. You know, I think sometimes now we imagine that people who supported the rich or want a small government. That is not what Hamilton wanted at all. He wanted a big, powerful government like England because he wanted to invest in roads and infrastructure and all sorts of things that would make America a world power, like a world economic power. That was his vision. Well, that version of the Constitution came into conflict with the Southern version. And there's often a sort of a pretense that Southerners were concerned about states rights. And I'm going to talk about why that's not the case. But one thing they were very concerned about was that the federal government would have too much power, too much power in particular to tax. Every limitation on the tax power in the Constitution was intended to defend slavery because the idea was that even a government limited to propertied white men Might vote for very high taxes on slaves and thereby achieve abolition. So we had these two competing instincts happening at the federal level, right? On the one hand, a strong but insulated federal government instead of Hamiltonian model. On the other hand, the slaveholder model, where you didn't want the federal government to have power. You didn't like democracy. You want, for example, the 3/5 clause so that you have far more power than you deserve in the government. But alongside that, you also want to limit taxation. Right. So that's why in the direct tax clause, right, the part of the constitution where the three fifths clause existed, where southern states were given representation, counting in three fifths of all other persons, which meant enslaved people, drastically inflating the power of the southern states. And that same clause requires that direct taxes, which we can talk about the long debates about what that meant, it was not actually clarified in the constitution or even in the constitutional convention itself, that direct taxes would also be apportioned by state. And the reason for that is because the direct tax definitely included a poll tax. And a poll tax would be the tax that you could use to end slavery. You just put a tax on enslaved people that's high, and then you force the enslavers to pay it. That's high enough to that they will have to emancipate. Right. And that was the fear that southerners had, both of northern whites, northern white men who would be in power to fight this government. But even in their own states across the south, you see very similar measures in state constitutions as well, to try and limit the capacity of the state to tax explicitly to prevent emancipation, to prevent poor whites from recognizing their economic interest. Right. Very few people were interested in the moral case against slavery at this point. Some were, but not very many. But that poor whites would recognize that slavery was bad for them, too, because it created this oligarchical society, and they would vote to tax slavery out of existence. And so you have these two instincts at the same time. One, to have a constitution that's really separated from the will of the majority of people. And two, that is surprisingly, I think, for many, if people today, if the founders were to see the implications of those tax agreements they made, I think they would be surprised. But the strong limitations on the power of the federal government to tax. So you have both insulated and a weirdly less powerful than anticipated federal government. Every holiday shopper's got a list. But Ross shoppers, you've got a mission like a gift run that turns into a disco snow globe throw pillows and PJs for the whole family, dog included. At Ross, holiday magic isn't about spending more, it's about giving more for less. Ross, work your magic.

[C]

Yeah, and that issue of wealth inequality keeps coming up because part of the role of those Southern states is to convince those, those poor whites to, like you said, vote against their own best interests.

[A]

That's right. And so this is something that you see a real difference between north and South. Right. I mean, of course there are rich northerners. There are very rich Northerners. Right. You know, merchant elite and eventually industrialists. But in the north and the early American period, there isn't really the kind of class tension that you'd associate with. You know, in the post Civil War era, for example, people who, yes, certainly they were both rich and poor, there were small farmers and large farmers. But in the free population, it was widely sort of believed that, yes, at first maybe you would be a small artisan, but eventually you'd have your own shop, you might start working for someone else. But that was a temporary position. And that, of course, proves not to be really the truth after a while. But that's the sort of sentiment. Whereas in the south, there's a lot of work that slaveholders have to do to try and convince poorer whites, non slave holding whites, that slavery is in their interest. Because it becomes clear quite quickly that if you have a small farm and it's worked by you and your family, it's very hard to compete when the guy next door has an enormous farm worked by people he doesn't pay. Right. So there's this economic class tension in the south that develops substantially earlier than in the north and really plays into the tension over taxation there.

[C]

And then you have the Civil War and things reset in this dramatic manner. You have the radical Reconstruction. It's this short period of time. I feel like it's, again, something people don't talk a lot about, maybe because it didn't last that long, but it's what it does in that moment is radical in terms of education and what it means to be a taxpayer. So tell us a little bit about that.

[A]

Yeah. So just a little review history lesson again, because this is something that was for many years very badly taught in American schools. It wouldn't be surprising if maybe listeners haven't had the full story of this. But in the post Civil War period, obviously the north has won the war. And for a couple of years, the north is pretty hands off. But it becomes rapidly clear that the Southern states are trying to reinstitute slavery by another name, there's sort of debt peonage. And they're putting in place rules that are basically attempting to undermine the new amendments, right, that created a sort of citizenship for black Americans. Right? Citizenship and voting rights and an end of slavery. And so the Congress steps in and they're like, actually, no, this war had consequences. And we said that black people are free now, and you're going to respect that. Black male citizens can vote and can run for office. And that's the period known as radical Reconstruction. During this brief period, black men voted and they ran for office. In states like South Carolina, they were. They made up more than half of the legislature's legislature. It was a majority black state, a majority black legislature. And you can only. I mean, if you think about what that means, you're not, you know, you're not five years from the end of slavery. And now the government is a majority black government. And so this is. I mean, it's a more profound revolution fundamentally than the American Revolution was, right? This isn't a social revolution. It is the first effort to create multiracial democracy in America. And I think we understand today exactly how hard that has been to achieve. But this was our first effort. And it is very, very brief. But I think it's worth talking, as you said, about its successes and what it was trying to achieve. So what were black legislators trying to do for the brief period of time in which they were allowed to vote and to hold office? Well, two things, mostly, because this is what. These are two main things that freed people wanted. They wanted, one, to work their own land, right? They didn't want to suddenly become tenant farmers for the guy who had enslaved their family for a hundred years. No. They wanted to have their own farm and do their own work. So they wanted land. Two, they wanted education. I don't think any number of historians have made this point, but it is hard to imagine a people more committed to education than black Americans, historically speaking, because across the south before the Civil, it was in many places illegal and punished by extreme violence for black people to learn to read. And the level of commitment to education, as Frederick Douglass would say, as a path to freedom, was profound. So they wanted schools. And I should say the schools that Reconstruction government set up were not just for black people. They were setting up public schools basically for the first time because slaveholders had hated taxation so much, they didn't have schools for poor white kids either. So now they're trying to build an entire public school system in just a few years. But here's the underlying thing, if you wanted to have schools, you had to have tax revenue to pay for it. And if you wanted to encourage the former Confederates, the plantation owners, to sell their land because they didn't do land reform, there were some small efforts in this regard. We can talk about it if you'd like, but by the time of radical Reconstruction, it's clear that land reform is not going to happen. If you want to encourage plantation owners to sell parts of their land, you got to raise taxes on property, right? You've got to raise taxes on land so that maybe they'll be convinced to sell off portions and maybe Friedman can afford to buy it and they can be the small farmers that they, you know, that was their dream, you know, this goal. So the goals of Reconstruction, this agenda was required taxation, right? If you want schools, if you want land, you have to pay for those things somehow. And that the story of Reconstruction a serious portion of the defeat of Reconstruction. Right. You know, Reconstruction did not fail in and of itself, but it was failed because Confederates never accepted the defeat. They never accepted these governments. And the northerners gave up. And a big part of getting the northerners to give up and a big part of managing to unite across that class divide we'd already talked about between rich whites and poor whites was this new rhetoric of the taxpayer. It will sound very familiar to everyone who has read a newspaper since about 1980 that there is an idea that there is this burdened, hard working taxpayer out there who's being asked to pay extra taxes because someone, and here's where the dog whistle comes, someone is getting government benefits that they don't deserve. The modern version of this is the welfare queen. But it was the same kind of rhetoric 100, 150 years earlier because the Confederates reorganized themselves as taxpayers. They tried first to defeat radical reconstruction by appealing to poor whites on racial basis alone. And this was somewhat less successful than they anticipated. A non zero, certainly not a majority, but a non zero percentage of poor whites in Appalachian type regions, the hilly upcountry as it was generally called, they voted for Reconstruction governments. They either voted for the constitution, they sometimes voted Republican. And this shocked the plantation owners and they knew they had to come up with a new strategy. So they reorganized themselves not just on a straightforward racial basis, like voting against black people. We are both white, they said, aren't these taxes too heavy? And poor whites, yeah, the land taxes were kind of heavy. Now. They weren't heavier than they were in the north, but they were used to not paying any taxes. At all. And of course the economy is in a crisis all across the south after the Civil War. So now, oh, aren't you poor burden taxpayers. Come vote for the other party. Don't vote for this reconstruction government because it's just what you're paying for is boondoggles for them, those undeserving government beneficiaries. And the other thing, the taxpayer rhetoric did not only did it allow the sort of planter class to reconnect with poor whites who had just fought a war that they absolutely knew was not in their economic interest, it also allowed the plantation class to connect with northerners with whom they had also just fought a war. Right. But Northern industrialists were looking at their cities where there were sort of proto unions forming and new waves of immigration bringing in people with ideas about working class politics that industrialists now newly rich thanks to the Civil War were pretty angry about. And suddenly. Oh yeah, I the, you know, the factory owner here in the North, I too am a burden taxpayer. And these Confederates, former Confederates that are trying to overthrow the government. Government, I can connect with them. I see that we share a concern that perhaps democracy has gone too far. Again. A recurring theme throughout the book. Right. That the taxpayer is suddenly is used as the symbol for the wealthy to basically disguise the fact that what they're afraid of is governance. That includes the poor.

[C]

Yeah, absolutely. You've got some great political cartoons in the book that are painful to look at but, but show how this was done. So let's talk about that role of industrialization because you've got this shift in the country. We're moving from an agricultural society and that sort of begins the fight for if we're not taxing land, can we tax income? And you've got a lot of people who try to stop it, including the world's richest man at the time. So what, what was happening there? What did the adoption of an income tax really signify about shifting American values?

[A]

Yeah, so we had the income tax in the Union during the Civil War was one of the taxes used to pay for. And it's one of the taxes that we used to pay for the Union victory. The Confederacy's failure to tax really damaged their war fighting capacity. And this goes back to slave owners not wanting to pay taxes because they fundamentally didn't want a strong government because they who like to imagine themselves as masters of their own little universe and not really hold into anyone or any laws. So the Confederacy has a weak tax system. The Union has a strong tax system. It includes an income tax and the tax is allowed to expire after the war. The government needs vastly less money, and we're about to move into the high tariff era. The government's going to have more money than it knows what to do with an issue that's hard to imagine today. But eventually, because tariffs, as it turns out, and perhaps I had not expected, I must say this chapter to be relevant when I wrote it.

[C]

Quite relevant, yes.

[A]

Tariffs. I was like, I was going to have to explain, but more people would know this now than would otherwise. Tariffs are expensive for consumers, right? They raise the cost of goods and then you pay that. And 150 years ago, 125 years ago, whatever, Americans noticed that tariffs were very high and it sent a ton of money to the protected industries. They had the few people who owned those companies and extracted a lot of money from poorer people, consumers, and especially farmers. Because America had this wonderful powerful farm economy. We didn't need tariffs to compete on the open markets. The tariffs didn't do much good for farmers. So they were always on the losing end of tariffs, by and large. So anyway, so people are real mad about those tariffs. And at the same time, of course, wealth is consolidating in part because of the tariff system, because it was such a strong protection for a few very powerful industries owned by a few very powerful amendment. So one of the reasons people want to bring the income tax back that had been allowed to expire after the war is because they want to start shifting taxes off of the poor and onto the rich, for whom, of course, the minor costs and some additional expenses are totally overshadowed by the vast wealth that their profits that their companies produce thanks to the tariffs. So there's a drive for a new income tax. The one they passed in 1894 is very similar to the Civil War income tax. So now we're going to have an income tax. It's very small. It would have been quite negligible from a financial perspective. But then something really shocking happens. So this is the Gilded Age, right? We're about to see Plessy v. Ferguson. We're about to see a bunch of other really reactionary decisions from the Supreme Court. And I'm giving the answer away here. The Supreme Court decides, at odds with all precedent, that the income tax is unconstitutional. No more income tax. And they did this very much from the perspective that an income tax was the first step in a class war power, that we cannot once again trust average people with the power to tax because they will do it wrong and they will punish the rich. And the idea Democracy is fine as far as it goes, but we don't want it to actually have, we don't want to put money on the line. So that's the dynamic. The income tax is declared unconstitutional, which means that you have a state by state, decades long campaign for an income tax amendment. And of course this sweeps the west, where the, where farmers live and are paying these heavy tariffs. And also where there was a very strong progressive populist and then progressive and also socialist movement, the real radicals in the west during this period. And they're supporting expansions of government. They want railroads to be, you know, they want public ownership of all kinds of things and they want an income tax. But the interesting thing is that the income tax, of course to pass a constitutional amendment requires that you can't just have the west vote for it, you have to get in the South. South votes for it tenuously because, I mean, they're not really paying because these are pretty poor states at this point. But it's still taxes and they're still hesitant about that. That remains part of the sort of culture there. But what about the Northeast? Can we get any of the Northeastern states, the sort of bastion of these economic elites, to vote for the income tax? Well, J.D. rockefeller, the richest man in the world at the time, and by some standards I think I would have to check. But until recently he was still the richest man who had ever lived. If you updated the figures, although I think we may actually be reaching a level of wealth inequality that was, would lead me to question whether that was still true. But anyway, hands down, the richest man at the time, well, he does not like the income tax, as one might expect, and he puts all of his effort into trying to crush this thing, particularly in the states where he has a ton of power, New York being the main one. He gets together all his lawyers for Standard Oil, one of these companies that absolutely owns the market as a monopoly and is benefiting hugely from the tariff system. He gets his lawyers together and they send a memo to every legislator in Albany to try and prevent them from passing the income tax. And this memo makes some quibbles here and there. About what? About the income tax and state bonds and whatever. So it has some throat clearing in the beginning, but then they get to the point, which is that they think that the income tax is an indication, it is the most dangerous thing a democracy can do, that progressive taxation is the fundamental threat that democracy poses to a minority. And by a minority they mean, of course, as usual, the rich. So they send this memo out and they do all their lobbying and they do all their buying and selling and so forth, and for a while they win. But the problem is that the income tax is hugely popular. In fact, tax on the riches remains hugely popular today. So this is a very standard American opinion that the wealthy people need to pay more in taxes. Strong majority of Americans, and that's not a partisan position, a strong majority of all Americans think that the rich should pay more. Well, strong majority of Americans undoubtedly, had there been polls in 1910, would have agreed that the rich needed to pay more than 2. And so after several defeats where any number of papers are complaining about the influence of Standard Oil over the legislatures in Albany, there is finally a breakthrough. And what happens, more or less, is that a bunch of the conservative Republicans get defeated in the ballot box in part over this issue of taxation. One of the conservatives who survived says that when he votes in the next, next time the income tax was brought before the legislature, he said, oh, he's going to change his vote because he has heard from his constituents on the subject and is going to have to vote against his own preferences. So even in New York, despite all of Rockefeller's money, we get an income tax. And that along with the other states is enough to get an income tax amendment, which is why we have an income tax today.

[C]

The anxiety over punishing the rich seems to be a theme that runs throughout the entire history of our country.

[A]

Yeah. And you know, the thing that's shocking about that is how at odds it is with the demands of the masses. You know, what American sort of mass, mass moves for a more egalitarian economic policy. In the United States, there absolutely are mass movements for in favor of more egalitarian policies, but they're quite moderate. I mean, you know, it's never that only the rich should pay. Right. It's always that they should just pay so that it's in keeping, you know, so that we're not a country run by a few oligarchs. Right. It's always that, you know, we'll pay too. You see this in Reconstruction as well, right. There's moves to raise taxes on land to try and get at some of the wealth of the former slave owner class. But there's all. They put this reconstructed government put in place poll taxes, which is a flat tax that every person pays the same amount. And that was going to fall incredibly heavily on freed people. But they wanted to pay because they wanted to demonstrate that they were contributing to the public schools from which they would benefit it. And so there's this constant disconnect, I would say, between the fears of economic elites about what the masses want. Right. I mean, in the earlier period in the sort of constitutional era, it was, you know, that people wanted paper money so they could pay taxes. And what, you know, the sort of more hysterical voices among the elite were saying was that what they wanted was paper money so that there would be rampant inflation and it would be a jubilee, all debts would be canceled by the inflation being so high. This is nonsense sense. No one wanted that. What they wanted was to be able to pay their bills. Right. And so again and again you see this huge disconnect where even quite moderate economic policies are treated as, as a terrifying threat to the, to the economic order. And they they really never were. Yeah.

[C]

And, and even in, in the World War II era, you talk about the patriotism and this idea of people paying their fair share in taxes. You have this moment where people are, are, are proud to pay their taxes. They, they feel like this is their contribution to, to building America. And there's that, there's that real rush of America on the world stage and all of that, and then it sort of erodes. So tell us a little bit about how that erosion takes place and, and how it shifts how we think about taxation.

[A]

So, okay, just taking one step back. We have an income tax amendment for the first part start, you know, for the next, I guess, you know, 30 years. The income tax is a class tax. It applies to only the very rich. Right. And it's not, it's not at first very high. Then it gets extremely high. In World War I. Right. The income tax becomes extremely progressive extremely quickly. But yeah, it's applied to a tiny little fraction of the public. We arrive at World War II and there's a decision to be made because it's very obvious we're going to need a lot more money. And you, you. There's not actually, and this remains the case, by the way, there is not actually, despite the fact that some people are very rich, they're very few of them. So it's not actually enough money to achieve, achieve huge ends. Right. It's enough money to achieve some ends, but it's not enough money to achieve, for example, defeating the Nazis. So we need to have a mass tax. There were two basic ways you could do this. You could extend the income tax so that it applies to more people. Right. So that it would be a tax everyone pays. Or you could have a national sales tax for various reasons. European countries mostly went the other way on that. They have a National sales tax. Our country did not do that, partly because FDR was very committed to the income tax. And so. But what that means is here we are in the middle of a war, and every working American is suddenly going to have to file a tax form. They have never done it before, and there's no calculators. And they're going to have to put this money in the mail. By the way, there's not withholding either. So it's not coming out of your paycheck in small bites that are sort of manageable. No, you're going to get to the end of the year, and you're going to have to send a check to the government, and you're going to have to work it out on paper, and you're going to have to know that this is a thing you have to do do. Your bank can't just wire it or something. This is actually an enormous endeavor. And so the Treasury Department devotes itself to making this something that's possible. There are all sorts of fun things in the book you can read about. They made Donald Duck cartoons to explain to people how to pay income taxes. And so they have Donald Duck. He's listening to the radio, and the announcer with the big booming 1940s radio voice comes on and says, there's something you can do to help with the war effort. And Donald Duck is, of course, thrilled. And Neil comes back and he's got a sieve on his head and he's ready to fight. He's like, you can pay your income taxes. And he looks horrified. He collapses on the ground. And so then he comes back and he's carrying an abacus and a thesaurus and a slide rule and a T square and a million other things, a globe. I don't know what he thinks he's going to have to do. But anyway, he's very worried about how he's going to file his taxes. And they're like, no, no, it's really easy. And then they take you through a form that frankly, would look familiar. If anyone actually remembers what a 1040 looks like. It doesn't really look that different today day. And sort of explained, you know, here's how you do it. And Donald Druck is so excited, of course, that he runs to Washington, D.C. with his check. And the announcer's like, oh, you don't have to do that. You can just put it in the mail. You know, this is wonderful piece of patriotic, you know, sort of Disney cartooning. That concludes with a message about how it's taxes that are going to defeat the Axis, right? That what's going to happen is the money is going to get turned into planes and bombs and it's going to bring up our boys home. That's the idea, right, that you're going to have that we're going to be able to end the war faster because we chipped in. And if you can't afford your, you know, if you're too old to fight, you know, you can still do your part. And here's what's crazy. It worked. They did it. The, the money came in, people. There was a, there was another. Irving Berlin wrote a song about, you know, how you should pay your taxes and it talked about writing a check to Uncle Sam. People actually wrote checks to Uncle Sam. Okay. This was a new idea how to pay taxes on, you know, to the federal government. People didn't know, so. Yeah, but there's this huge onslaught of, of patriotism that makes the income tax work. And so now people know how to pay income taxes. It's an amazing achievement. If income taxes were popular, people thought they were fair and that it weakens. But the real, the real damage gets done to the sort of shared civic fabric when there is the great reaction to the civil rights movement. And suddenly for some people, this country isn't just their country anymore. It's a country that they have to share with people of a different race. Right. And as black Americans are reincorporated finally into the American polity, there is a reaction that takes so exactly the form of the redeemers who fought against reconstruction. And suddenly that the taxpayers are being burdened once again by those people and the government benefits they are receiving. And it's not actually that different in another sense as well, that for white Americans, the 50s and 60s have been a time of huge government investment in them from which black people were excluded. Right. And in the same way, after the Civil War, the reason that black people were poor is because all the wealth had been taken were so centuries. Right? But talk about yourself as a taxpayer elided over the reason that some people had enough money to pay taxes and others didn't. Right? And so you see the same thing in the post civil rights era where conservatives after a while recognize that it's not the time, it's not politic to be very explicitly racist in their rhetoric, but they can tap into that racism by using an anti tax rhetoric and anti government rhetoric that, that encourages people to see themselves as not citizens, equal with others, all of us contributing, but as a burden taxpayer who is not getting A fair shake.

[C]

And of course this hides the real villain because you've got a fact in the book that, that I, I sort of knew, but really floored me is that in the early 1950s, the government's receiving nearly as much from corporate tax as from individual income tax. By 1970, that really starts to shift. And now corporate tax is only about a third of tax revenue. So really there's, there's a whole group of, you know, they're not people, they're corporations that kind of aren't paying their fair share at this point.

[A]

Yeah, that's right. I mean, to put like a framework for this larger context, I mean, you might think given the amount of anti tax rhetoric there has been since, you know, basically Since Goldwater in 64, but really with Reagan in the 80s, you might think that your tax, that, you know, average American's taxes have gone down. They have not, not Americans are today paying a larger share of their income in taxes than they were decades ago. But you know who's gotten a tax break is everyone at the very top. Right. And part of that's about corporate taxation, but part of it's just about the collapse of the top rate. We don't have those rates that were 90% in World War II, 70% as late as the Reagan administration, you know, and what that has allowed for is a consolidation of wealth that is really extraordinary and I think at this point threatens, you know, the Republicans public.

[C]

Yeah, so, so let's talk about that. Talk. Tell us a little bit about that Republican movement that happens in, in the Reagan era and beyond.

[A]

So what you see over the last, well, my whole lifetime, I suppose so, you know, 40, 50 years, somewhere in there, what you see is an increasingly strict commitment to an anti tax position. And that was not the position of the mid 20th century Republican Party. The mid 20th century Republican Party was concerned about budget balance. Right. But not unwilling to invest in certain kinds of things. Right. There was strong business support for a bunch of Great Society measures actually in the 1960s. But what happens is that we move from a situation where the Republican Party is thinking about, okay, but we need to match revenues with spending and there needs to be some sort of balance there. And maybe we're a little bit more on the austerity side than the Democrats are. They move to a position of absolute opposition to taxation, even when it's their spending priorities they're getting spent on. Right. So I mean, you can think later on if you think about George W. Bush, hugely expensive wars, a massive expansion of Medicare Actually Medicare Part D, but no sense that those things need to be paid for. Right. The idea, and this is quite explicit in some of the Republican strategists writings, is that they would rack up huge deficits and then Democrats would come into office and they'd deal with that problem and it would kind of hamper the capacity of the Democratic party to achieve its priorities because they would be handed this debt, right? And you see this happen several times over, right? Clinton for example, comes in and he achieves budget balance, right? And then all of those savings are immediately blown on set of awards. And so there's this recurring process by which deficits are used to handle ham to hamstring Democratic administrations. Right? But from the perspective of democracy, what's really important here is that the anti tax rhetoric becomes explicitly and ever more sort of, you know, not just knee jerk, but without any exception in anti government rhetoric like government can never be good, government always has to be shrunk, taxes always have to go down, especially on the rich. And that ratchet effect that has these huge implications for deficits for fiscal policy in the United States, but it indicates a declining faith in the capacity of government to do good things to the point where I think we arrived today, where this year I should say I submitted my book manuscript in November of 2024. So I had no idea what was going to happen this year, but I, I suspected there were going to be really substantial cutbacks to the basics of what government does, what the federal government does. I did not know it would happen so quickly. I did not know it would happen outside of the legislative process certainly. But that arriving at the point where government can just be slashed all the time and also the sort of, I think throughout this year we've seen over and over again the sort of surprise that government does something and actually we needed that function and maybe we bring those people back, right? Oops, did we turn off the wrong switch? Because we just hit all the switches and now we're going to find out, oh, it turns out we wanted someone watching our nuclear silos or whatever. And so you see this extreme anti government rhetoric growing and growing and growing. And fundamentally it is always at its core an anti democratic rhetoric, right? Because the idea is always that we can't trust the government because we can't trust the people with power over the economy, right? The implication is always that, that not that we need to strengthen our democratic processes so that government works better. No, it's that government, government cannot work. It cannot be allowed to have the money that would Allow it to have power over private interests.

[C]

So last question for you. We've gone through all of this. Is there, is there a path back to a fairer type of taxation? You know, at this point, so much of our tax system is about this idea of, you know, pay your taxes because you might get a refund. And people don't seem to really understand how all that works. But are there ways that technology even might impact shifts in how we pay taxes, the AI revolution and what that might mean?

[A]

Yeah, so I think, I mean we had an initiative underway until this year that I thought was a real step forward with taxpaying, which was called direct file, which was free public tax preparation. Answering the age old question of why it is the IRS provides you with an annual quiz about how much income you have and then tells you when you got it wrong. Like why did we do it that way? They've been trying to fix that one for 80 years. I mean, from the beginning, as soon as they were doing mass income tax, they were trying to get pre populated forms. It was something that Reagan supported, it was something George W. Bush supported. And we've never managed to get it done in recent decades because for profit tax preparers had a business model that this would have interfered with. But we had this brief period where we were trying direct file. It was extremely successful. It was a small pilot and it would have had its second year and I think an enormous success success if we had not simultaneously been cutting 20, 25% of the IRS staff and refusing to spend any money to promote this program. But I think that that makes a big difference, right? If the government were respectful about how it asked us to pay income taxes, I think a lot of people wouldn't mind so much. But it's that annual irritation and sort of the disrespectful process that you have to pay just to pay your taxes, right? That's one thing. So on the technology side, I think that was an endeavor and it was shut down this year by this administration. But that doesn't mean that it didn't work work. And so it could easily, I think, be brought back in a future administration and also in the states. So that's on the technology side. On the tax policy side, I say two things, right? One of these things is an idea that I think will be very comfortable for people on the sort of left of the political spectrum. That is to say that I think that we need to return to tax policies that were actually first promoted by Thomas Paine, who you may recall, wrote Common Sense we wrote the pamphlet that convinced Americans not merely to who they should be an independent country, but that they should be an independent republic, that they did not need a king. So Tom Paine wrote Common Sense. He also wrote the Rights of Man. And in the Rights of Man, he lays out a progressive tax on the income from wealth with a top rate of 100%. That's pretty bold. Even in the middle of World War II, we did not try 100% as the top bracket. But his idea was that at some very high figure for him, in the tens of thousands of pounds, in modern dollars, approximately a billion dollars, a certain level of wealth was incompatible with a republic. That level of wealth consolidation would corrupt elections is what he said. And I think he would not find the contemporary experience at odds with his predictions. So that's what he proposed. So I think that returning to a system of very steep progressive taxation of both income and wealth is essential for protecting democratic practice. This. So that's one thing, but the other thing, I'll tell you, mass taxation needs to be something that politicians are willing to stand behind, because taxation should not be understood as a punishment for doing something wrong. Taxation is everyone's contribution to the public good. And the fact is, when you put people in those terms and you show them what government is doing and it's something worthwhile, they'll pay. Not only did they pay in World War II, but the most popular taxes in America are the ones everyone pays. They're aggressive. The payroll tax that funds Social Security and Medicare and the sales tax. These are the taxes Americans like and they know they pay them. So I think that the real failure. Right. I think people on the left are largely comfortable talking about progressive taxation, at least to some degree. Perhaps not Tom Paine levels, but some level. But where they absolutely fell down on the job is in a willingness to say to the American people that government is worth it, it's worth the money you spend, and we're going to make it worth it, and we're going to ask you to pay for. For. And I think that frankly, the abdication of that kind of rhetoric, which we used to have until the sort of post civil rights era, but it was very common in earlier eras that taxes were worth paying because government was worthwhile, because it was our government. If we don't find that rhetoric again, I don't think we can rebuild our fiscal system. And in some sense, I think it means we can't rebuild our democracy.

[C]

The book is Price of Democracy. Vanessa Williamson, thank you so much for your time.

[A]

Yeah, this was fun.