Americans’ attitudes toward taxes are full of contradictions. Many feel the tax system is illegitimate and dislike the federal income tax, especially, yet uphold paying taxes as a mark of citizenship—a duty they are proud to fulfil—as Vanessa Williamson found in her 2017 book, Read My Lips. Ruth Braunstein explores this contradiction in her insightful book, My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America. A sociologist of religion, Braunstein examines the frames that politicians and tax activist communities have used to describe both taxes and their uses: sacred, profane, and mundane. She therefore provides a “cultural sociology of taxation” that helps us understand how Americans have tried to make meaning of paying taxes. Braunstein takes an ethnographic approach, gathering qualitative evidence from interviews, archives, online sources, press releases, memoirs, and so on. Her aim is thick description of the “moral logics that structure America’s taxpaying culture” (p. 5). There are four: the act of taxpaying as sacred or profane, and the use of tax dollars as sacred or profane. Rarely is the process of collecting taxes, necessary for the funding of all other government functions, simply mundane.
You would not know it from today’s rhetorical hostility toward taxes, but Americans’ tax compliance is high by international comparison. Braunstein helps explain this puzzle with the first of the four moral logics: the sacralization of the “voluntary” taxpaying experience. Invoking religious imagery, Braunstein asserts that April 15, Tax Day, was originally a “highly visible part of America’s national ‘liturgical cycle’” (p. 28), a civic ritual in which people would queue at the Post Office to get their returns postmarked, a collective enactment of this central duty of citizenship. Although the widespread use of tax preparation services, software, and electronic filing has diminished the visibility of this collective ritual, the sacredness of taxpaying lives on, as evidenced by the duty and pride Williamson’s interviewees expressed. In contrast, taxes that are paid invisibly, like sales and excise taxes, do not elicit the same feelings of “good citizenship and entitlement to receive public benefits” (p. 31). The ire that many Americans feel toward lower income, often non-white people who do not pay federal income taxes but who do pay regressive sales and payroll taxes suggests that those less visible taxes do not count when it comes to the sacralization of taxpaying. The great salience of the federal income tax bolsters a sense of community but also enables “payers” to denigrate “takers”—a highly racialized practice of boundary building that dates to the post-Civil War period, as historian Camille Walsh explored in her 2018 book, Racial Taxation: Schools: Segregation and Taxpayer Citizenship, 1869–1973.
The next moral logic, taxes as profane, may sound familiar after four decades of a virulent anti-tax movement in the Republican Party. Braunstein importantly shows, however, that the profanity of taxation is a widespread sentiment only because mainstream and fringe thought have converged. She profiles a number of “tax defiers,” including Peter Hendrickson. Hendrickson’s 2003 book, Cracking the Code, serves as the bible for tax protestors who believe that private property is sacred, taxation profane, and the federal income tax unconstitutional. Other defiers even more vividly invoke religious imagery, depicting taxes as “tithes to the Synagogue of Satan” (p. 49). The contemporary GOP draws on these ideas in portraying the “taxman as thief” and the Internal Revenue Service as “too big and too mean” (p. 73). With calls to defund the IRS, Republicans give “mainstream credibility to conspiratorial claims that had been consigned to the political fringe” (p. 73).
The state’s use of taxes has also been framed as sacred. Braunstein recounts the well-known propaganda efforts during World War II, which linked federal income taxes that many Americans were paying for the first time directly to the war effort. She also documents lesser-known campaigns, such as 1950s-era books and posters for schools and 4-H clubs created by educator Francis Leonard Bacon which extolled taxes as the fuel that “makes the wheels go round” and paying taxes as second only to voting as the “working basis for practical citizenship” (p. 84). The posters asserted that “Everybody PAYS … And Everybody BENEFITS” (p. 84), although notably the people pictured were all white, another example of racialized boundary drawing around U.S. taxing and spending.
The spending-as-sacred frame is fragile in other ways. “Your highway dollars at work” signs were originally meant to show the government’s diligence in using taxpayer funds. However, the signs and the Highway Trust Fund behind them also fostered an image of taxes as akin to user fees in which one should only pay for what one uses, rather than pay taxes to fund broad public goods. Highway spending also annoyed taxpayers by funding construction that slowed travel times or by not funding enough construction, with shoddy roads also slowing travel times. Highway construction both desecrated the environment and bulldozed Black neighborhoods, further sullying the pro-tax use message and shifting the sacred to the profane. Indeed, as Braunstein points out, although framing the use of taxes as profane is a constant among fiscal conservatives today, it has a long history in the United States. She devotes two fascinating chapters to movements from the political left and right resisting the use of taxes for war and abortion, respectively.
One of Braunstein’s most important points is that underlying all four frames is a “master frame” rooted in the primacy of individualism in American cultural and political life: the notion that tax revenues are the sum of individual contributions, undermining a sense of “collective commitment” or “solidarity.” Because Americans “valorize individual choice and control over how their dollars are spent,” they lean toward a “consumerist” or “contractual” vision of citizenship, in which “people receive public benefits in direct relation to how much they have paid into the tax system,” known as the “benefit principle” of taxation (p. 13). The problem is that the American tax system—especially in its most visible element, the progressive federal income tax—is designed on the “ability-to-pay principle,” in which tax burdens vary with people’s means but fund “public programs and institutions that are shared by all,” thereby underwriting a “covenantal vision of citizenship” (p. 13) in which taxpaying is “an expression of collective commitment… to something larger than the self” (p. 192).
The chronic tension between these two visions of citizenship—between getting what you pay for versus participating in a “community of shared fate”—lays at the heart of many American debates about taxation (p. 13). It particularly manifests in maker-versus-taker rhetoric that constantly threatens the nation’s shared democratic project. Braunstein’s four moral logics help us understand political economists’ finding that providing public goods in multiracial democracies is extraordinarily difficult. As she writes, “both individualism and pluralism pose distinct challenges for strengthening this fiscal infrastructure on which we might build a common life” (p. 13).
Braunstein’s goal in the book is descriptive, offering a “field guide to the meanings taxpaying holds for a wide swath of Americans” (p. 15). It is clearly aimed at explaining and categorizing the world around us rather than at testing hypotheses. The selection of cases might strike quantitative researchers as a bit random. That said, for political scientists and public opinion scholars, she supplies a plethora of hypotheses to explore empirically. How common are these logics in elite discourse over time? How prevalent are these frames among the public? Who views taxes through these differing lenses? Do certain frames move public opinion on taxes? Are taxes framed differently in other countries, and with what effects on the legitimacy of tax systems? In countries with return-free systems and without a highly visible “Tax Day,” or in countries where a greater share of public spending is funded by broad-based consumption taxes like the VAT, are there fewer boundaries between “payers” and “takers”? The list goes on.
My Tax Dollars is highly readable and engaging. Braunstein has uncovered many colorful characters and movements, only a handful of which I was able to mention here. Her account helps us understand Americans’ many contradictory feelings about taxes and the implications of the sacred and profane, of individualism and pluralism, for democratic governance.
