We Owe Each Other Better: Reject Slopulism, Embrace Building the Republic

Taxes are not a punishment. They’re the fuel in the engine of the republic, a positive affirmation of and direct investment in our values, and a system of incentives and disincentives to shape our collective vision of the good. They pay for education, infrastructure, foundational research, national defense, healthcare, public services, and more. Taxes are how we build the world for each other. 

It’s true that corporations and the rentier class have not been paying their fair share for some time. It’s fair to demand the immediate reimposition of a rational, functional, progressive tax scheme to begin to balance out the decades of damage and disinvestment trailing the Reagan era, and to banish his ghost from our house forever. And make no mistake, he is haunting us. Reaganomics, while a disaster for Americans in the long term, sank many of its core assumptions into the shared soil of the American psyche at something like the level of myth. “Taxes must be bad because they take my money, ergo the government must be bad because they collect taxes, ergo the government must be fought, ergo any attempt to make the government better is an attack on me.”

The thoroughness with which this myth penetrated the mind of the electorate left Democrats almost permanently on the backfoot. Even today, swimming in the inflated prices of universally despised tariffs and staring down the barrel of a war-induced energy crisis, Americans still instinctively trust the GOP on the economy far more than one would think. This reality gave birth to the “tinkercrat.” Republicans might make deep revenue cuts and pair them with deficit-busting spending on war, drug enforcement, and general inefficiency; but Democrats would follow behind them with a general orientation toward better governance. They’d raise taxes a bit, pair some patchwork, targeted social spending, balance political priorities against long-term deficit reduction, and hope for the best. Occasionally, these efforts might even stick. But eventually, Republicans would come back and wipe it all away with another devastating tax cut.

But a permanent fighting retreat is still a permanent retreat. The effect has been a ratchet that only spins in one direction: a people who are poor, broken, and subjugated by the rich.

You can almost understand why some Democrats are starting to falter. We’ve seen several proposals recently to cut or eliminate income taxes, gas taxes, and others for working Americans. These proposals are almost uniformly shortsighted and, in some cases, flatly destructive. We have to be careful here. It demonstrates an admirable ambition for a politics focused on wage earners, but largely fails the basic tests of math and citizenship.

In light of this anti-tax slopulism, it bears repeating that taxes per se are not bad. They are not a punishment, they are not theft. They may be misused, but that depends on how frequently we choose to elect Republicans. As working Americans, we should not crave a world of zero tax obligations. In fact, they are vital for us to feel the attendant bonds to each other as fellow citizens and partners in the American experiment—bonds which make our republic possible. It’s more difficult by far for oligarchs and political hucksters to argue that society doesn’t belong to you when you literally pay for it. And in fact, it’s much easier for us to claim final sovereignty over corporations and plutocrats, because we pay our taxes and they do not. The claim doesn’t just reside in the abstract realm of reason and natural rights, but here in the mud and clay where the world is built with our backs and our tax dollars. 

Furthermore, cutting the tax base out from under the next Democratic Congress will render our badly needed post-Trump reconstruction dead on arrival. The implied argument of liberal-populist anti-tax posturing is that raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy will close the gap. It will not. Despite wealth inequality so staggering that our richest buffoons can simply buy nonexistent executive positions in the government and use them to commit crimes of virtually bottomless scope, there still isn’t enough money in taxing the rich and corporations alone to pay for what we need.

And if that’s still not enough, I have one last argument for you: in a tax cutting race, who wins—Democrats or Republicans? Democrats have shit to do. Ambitions for a better tomorrow. With a hundred justifications on their lips and the fetid breath of the death drive filing their sails, the GOP would bankrupt the earth and giggle while it crumbled around their feet. When mission-driven Democrats concede to the ruinous, solipsistic framework of Republicans, they create demand for the kinds of governing products no party interested in good governance can possibly deliver. And make no mistake, when we fail to deliver the slop we promised, we will lose. Ask Keir Starmer how his Labour government is faring across the pond, trying to win over the crowd by playing the enemy’s set list. To build the world we deserve, we need to leverage as much as we can of the entire tax base. While it wouldn’t hurt to raise the standard deduction to provide some immediate relief to low income Americans, the rest of us should be paying the rate required of our bracket. 

As for corporations, they should obviously be paying much more. The corporate tax rate should be high enough and write-offs structured tightly enough such that the only rational choice is to either pay your taxes, pay more to your employees, or expand your operations. Generate value for the real economy, not windfalls for executives and percentage points for shareholders.

And for the wealthy? As a general principle, you don’t tax the wealthy to build. You tax the wealthy to manage their power. No configuration of our wealthiest citizens could hold a candle to the actual power of the federal government, but the wealthiest among them can each individually outbid all other donors for the ear of any given politician. And as we saw with Elon Musk’s DOGE, that can have monstrous consequences. For this reason, every dollar over $100 million should fall into a confiscatory tax bracket of 100%. There’s no reason to allow anyone to accrue more wealth than that. Your life doesn’t improve in any way that matters by going from $100 million to $1 billion; the marginal value of an extra dollar at any point in that range is effectively zero. This would no doubt hurt some feelings, but I have little sympathy to spare for the editors at the Washington Post, who will be cosigning a thousand whiny blogposts from the desk of Jeff Bezos. Nor have I much patience for discourse around “good” billionaires. The point is not their individual moral quality, it’s their unjustifiable power. Force that money to finally trickle down where it can do some good.

Come what may, we must hold onto this truth: the future is what we build for each other. It can be a dream or a nightmare, but it’s nailed together entirely with our choices. Taxes are a hammer. Let’s build something better.

Featured image is Tiger Story Time at the Library