A Responsibility to Democracy, More than Just Voting

I spent most of my day one Friday in August listening to speeches on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, while dutifully manning the phones for constituent calls. This is not an activity I’d recommend. While I agreed with about half of the speeches on the floor politically, I could not help but notice a concerning through line in the other half. Debate focused on the Inflation Reduction Act, passed and signed in August of 2022. The legislation is, by all previous standards, an incredibly wide-ranging effort to fund climate change action, lower prescription drug costs, and decrease the federal government’s deficit. Every so often the ringing phone would disrupt the speeches from various members alternatively declaiming the virtues or decrying the excesses of the bill. As I did my best to courteously answer each call, I would often hear angry, threatening, or despairing voices exhorting the Congressman to vote no on the bill for increasingly ludicrous reasons. The calls reached a climax when one caller ranted that passage of the bill would lead “87,000 well-armed IRS agents to bust down their doors” and that the IRS would soon be a modern gestapo brought to bear against the American people. (I am personally deeply hesitant to make Nazi comparisons; our callers had no such qualms).

Typically when receiving such calls, the pattern and statistics converge until it’s clear that the callers have either found the same script or watched the same political commentary shows. The previous night, the Fox News primetime lineup unleashed tirades decrying the bill with chyrons warning of 87,000 IRS stormtroopers coming for average Americans. At the time I chuckled to myself, imagining a cadre of accountants armed with calculators, sharpened pencils, and assault rifles asking unsuspecting taxpayers if they were really sure they didn’t want to itemize. The next day I managed the phone again, receiving more diatribes about the possibility of an overzealous army of accountants and the Biden “regime.” As I sighed and logged the messages, I noticed the talking points on the phone were the same ones beamed from the floor of the House of Representatives to the TV above my head.

Numerous academics and pundits have shown that hyper partisan television has poisoned our national dialogue since the advent of 24-hour cable news. While media critics have decried social media as a singularly disruptive force leading to greater polarization, a recent Ars Technica collaboration with researchers at Microsoft, Penn, and Stanford found that TV-based echo chambers actually had a greater impact on polarization than online ones. As I sat answering phones in that Congressional office, at the junction of angry grassroots callers, members of Congress, and media, the message alignment could not have been more clear.

The consistency of the messaging both impressed and disturbed me; the core belief concerned me even more. It demonized a core responsibility of democracy: paying taxes. In the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, “taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.” At a very basic level, the idea of taxation boils down to the collective citizenry pooling their resources, voting on their priorities, and spending them on the outcome of that vote. Taxation acts as the most basic building block, the first step of the democratic process. The act of voting is the act of choosing both where resources come from and where those resources should go. If we all agree to live within a democracy, then we all must agree to pay our fair share based on the collectively decided rules and values. To understand the nature of the abrogation of responsibility to pay back in taxes what an individual has earned, we must look to the point where the American consciousness deemed taxes not as a contribution to our fellow citizens but rather a burden to be undermined and avoided.

President Kennedy challenged the American people to look beyond themselves and to their fellow countrymen, not what the country could do for them but what they could do for their country. The framers of the Constitution created a social contract in which we agree that every person gets a vote (well at least eventually we got to everyone.) In exchange for that say, everyone has to follow the laws that our representatives pass. Yet, at some point in recent history that ethos changed. In this country we often attach morality to wealth. Offshore thousands of jobs, bilk Medicare while providing mediocre care to senior citizens, stiff contractors building luxury properties and you get to become a Senator from Utah, a Senator from Florida and head of the NRSC, or President of the United States. These politicians ran for office on the strength of their ability to run the government like a business. In fact they ran their businesses without regard to the impact on the average citizen. In some cases each bent the law to the breaking point. In this flawed worldview, poverty must be a result of a moral failing while wealth absolves all. Yet as President Kennedy warned us, the citizenry must value not just what each person earns but also what they give back to the whole.

Somehow when tax time comes around, the morality of bending the rules in the name of a personal fortune far outweighs the responsibility the wealthy feel to our democracy. Former President Trump repeatedly claimed during rallies that he didn’t pay income tax because he was “smart.” Rep. Darrel Issa fought to include a tax loophole in the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act so that he could personally exploit it. Both Sen. Rick Scott and former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos both employed loopholes in gift and estate taxes to minimize their burdens. The problem is in fact bipartisan — Democratic Governor Jared Polis paid $0 in taxes for fiscal years 2013, 2014, and 2015 while he was a member of the House.

In a recent interview with The Forum podcast, Liz Hempowicz, Director of Policy at the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), proposed a solution: transparency. She advocated for a system that could show the revenue source and spend for every penny that comes in and out of government at all levels. If every citizen could see exactly how each penny benefitted them or their neighbors, perhaps they would realize just how much both they benefit from the public goods their tax dollars pay for or maybe they would just realize the staggering expense of what the government does. Maybe such a system could spark a new age of civic engagement.

We must ask ourselves how the dialogue changed from a sense of responsibility to our country and the answer is rather simple: the nine most terrifying words in the English language. When President Ronald Reagan famously declared “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” as the harbinger of all ills in American life, he highlighted the fundamental shift that the conservative movement sought to incept in the American consciousness. Eventually even the Democrats bought in with President Clinton proudly announcing that the “era of big government is over.”

Yet, that can never be true. We are a country founded on the principle of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. This denunciation of government represents nothing less than a denial of our founding principles. We should not limit our sacrifice for our democracy to performative flyovers and national anthems at sporting events. Our armed forces would probably prefer increased pay and spending on body armor anyway, which is only a possibility if everyone pays their due on Tax Day. I’m sure teachers noticed the cheering and signs of appreciation during the pandemic’s peak, but I’m also sure they’d much prefer paychecks that reflected the difficulty of public school teaching.

We want to be the greatest country in the world. Since the founding of this great experiment, we have believed that we have had a responsibility to our fellow citizens. We must recapture this sense of responsibility to one another and reclaim taxes as a democratic duty, not an evil enforced by jack booted thugs.