Taxes rule!
Let us now praise the central administration of services for the common good
Top notes:
This is an essay about chipping in a bit for something that lots of people enjoy. Speaking of which, did you know that only about 6-7% of the 7500 people who read the White Pages are paid subscribers? If you value this space, thanks for considering making your own contribution. As in all things, many hands make lighter work.
Today is Tax Day in the U.S. It isn’t the day when we pay our taxes (that happens throughout the year, either through paycheck withholding, quarterly estimated tax payments or, if University of Chicago economists are to be believed, jackbooted agents of the state showing up at your house to demand money at gunpoint). It is, however, the deadline for all U.S. taxpayers to submit a byzantine pile of half-understood calculations and pseudo-biographical tone poems to the Internal Revenue Service for approval.
The process is a real bummer, sadly. That’s by design. You have likely already heard about how filing our taxes could be easy and painless, but how nefarious lobbying on the part of Big Tax Prep (your Turbo Taxes, your H&R Blocks, your guys dressed as Statues of Liberty twirling signs around) keeps us from having nice things.
As it is, filing your taxes (particularly if you have any situation more complicated than “my employer gave me this W-2 and I just type it in''), is laborious, dispiriting, and positions us in an adversarial relationship with our government. TurboTax in particular is gamified in such a way that when I use it, I feel like I’m playing the house on a casino slot machine. I input a new number into their little interface, press send and the refund/”money owed” tracker at the top of the screen spins up and down, sending a fresh dose of dopamine or cortisol straight to my brain. It doesn’t take long before I’m actively obsessing over how to “win” at taxes that year, or worse yet, how to prevent the Federal Government from winning.
This isn’t just the fault of TurboTax. It’s really hard to be excited about taxation in the United States of America. How can we, when a depressingly high percentage of government expenditures go not towards care and solidarity, but to death-tools and punishment machines? In spite of the plaintive cry of that classic liberal bumper sticker, the Air Force still hasn’t had to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber, just as your local police department has never had to start a GoFundMe to purchase a new protestor-crushing-Batmobile-tank. In the meantime, the services we would like the government to provide for us (like educating our children or renewing our driver’s licenses) are too often left with crumbling buildings and soul-sucking queues.
The United States is a place whose never-fully-robust welfare state has been whittled down to the bone by decades of austerity and direct frontal attacks. Past attempts to get our government to play a more active, beneficial role in the lives of its populace have been thwarted by either direct or indirect appeals to White supremacy (the message always being: you don’t want Black people to get something nice from the government, right?). As Heather Mcghee argues so effectively in The Sum of Us, if you’re ever wondering why the U.S. doesn’t have great [fill in the blank] like other countries, you’ll find a depressingly consistent answer.
Not only has anti-Black racism kept the United States from instituting universal, egalitarian services (robust public transportation systems, free college, single payer healthcare), it has even corrupted the means by which our nation has engaged in its limited experiments with wealth redistribution. Why does America provide families with “tax credits” rather than direct monthly payments (to say nothing of cute little baby boxes)? Because back when such a system was proposed in the 1940s, dreams of U.S. child bond programs were squashed due to fears of a popular (White) outcry if word got out that all Black families were getting government checks. Generations of parents could have received direct payments from Washington D.C.— a clear gift. Instead, we’ve been stuck with a “credit,” which we have to “earn” based on how well we fill out our tax returns.
In a country such as this, it makes sense that when most Americans sit down to do our taxes, we solely root for our own personal refund and not for the health of the system as a whole. After all, the system as a whole often isn’t working for us, whereas that fleeting post-filing check from the I.R.S. feels like one of the few tangible forms of assistance many of us ever receive from our government.
All of this is true.
And also…
Taxes rule.
Even in the United States. Even in a country that has mucked up its social contract so badly. Even in a place that wastes far too much of our public funds on devices whose only purpose is to explode and kill people.
Even here, taxes rule and I love them so much.
I love them because, well, look at me! Do you know how few real, actual skills I possess? Off the top of my head: I can write a lot of words very quickly, I can facilitate meetings and workshops decently well, and I can make above average fish tacos and extremely good mixtapes.
That’s not all of my skills, I guess, but the full list isn’t that much longer.
In the meantime, think of all the things that I can’t personally do but that my local, state or federal government does for me.
I can’t drive a bus or a train. I can’t teach a class full of six-year-olds how to read. I can’t fill a pothole or build a bridge that won’t fall down. I can’t look at a new pill and determine whether or not it’s safe for human consumption. I might be able to deliver mail to a single household, but not hundreds of millions of them. You definitely wouldn’t want me testing the safety of your groundwater or providing a nation of schoolchildren with free breakfast every morning.
I could keep going! Can you imagine me, a man who struggles to keep his own house clean, attempting to manage municipal waste and recycling collection? Or facilitating a book lending service for hundreds of thousands of cities and towns out of my home? It would take less than an hour before I’d panic and just start throwing copies of The DaVinci Code at whomever came to my door. “Here, bring this back in a week… it’s about the Pope, I think??? And while you’re there, would you mind turning this bag of aluminum cans into a car chassis?!?”
And yes, perhaps some of you are capable of doing some of those things. I have family members who know how to drive U.S. Postal Service trucks, and others who are able to help consumers from getting ripped off by predatory corporations and banks, or who provide medical care to sick veterans. But even those hero relatives can’t do those things while also sending literal spaceships to the moon or re-grading an alley.
But do you know what’s incredible?
None of us have to do any of that by ourselves! Instead, we give some portion of the money we earn every year to the government, and in return we get to walk on sidewalks and bike on roads and board an airplane without the fear that it’ll crash into another airplane. We get to send our children to schools where another human being literally teaches them algebra, and then, when our day is done, we get to head out to a public park with a freshly mowed lawn and play softball with our neighbors. And that’s in the United States! A country that has actively tried to do as little as possible for the common good!
Seriously. What an absolute miracle! What a wonderful idea, taxes!
To all of you public sector miracle workers who offer your skills and gifts to the rest of us: Thank you, thank you, thank you! Chipping in for a small portion of your salary is literally the least I can do in return.
As for the greedy misanthropes who have worked to make the tax process more cumbersome and adversarial, as well as the humanity-loathing politicians, pundits and lobbyists who have ensured that our government is both starved of resources and does less care work and more death work, I offer the following two tax-day messages:
First: Cut it out! Seriously, you’ve made our world so much worse! Because of your bellyaching about how “taxation is theft” and your bad-faith David Stockman-style efforts to make government ineffectual so as to justify its extinction, our country is a sicker, poorer, more hostile and less caring place.
Secondly: In spite of how angry I am at you, I sincerely hope that you, too, get to benefit from all of the gifts that can only be provided by our government. I hope you live a longer, healthier life because you can breathe clean air and be cured when you are sick thanks to Federally-funded research. I hope that you never get food poisoning from a restaurant, never get ripped off by a scam business and are able to enjoy your leisure time on our gorgeous public lands.
I want all this for you not because you’ve earned or deserve it, but because that’s the gift taxation provides for all of us. It doesn’t issue a library card only after we’ve passed a “good person” test, or allow us to enroll in kindergarten because we promise to live a virtuous life. It offers services to all of us merely because we live in a place. All it asks in return is that we pay into the pot.
Again, what an absolute miracle.
So happy tax day, everybody! The more we celebrate this treasure, the more we can imagine how much better it can be. We are not just individual tax-filers trying to grab our piece of the pie. Together, we’re chipping in to build a collective miracle. A small percentage of that miracle already exists, but it pales in comparison to the humanity-loving network of care that we can build together.
End notes:
Public Service Broadcasting is a very well-named band, in that their thing is that they create songs from public/government audio samples. Their biggest hit is “Go,” a song which answers the question "If you build a song off of N.A.S.A. transmissions, will it make whatever mundane activities your listeners are engaged in (going for a run, cooking dinner, wasting time while writing their weekly newsletter essay) FEEL as historic as putting a human being on the moon?”
The answer, by the way, is yes, absolutely. Shout out to flight director Gene Kranz.
[As always, you can check out the collected song of the week playlist on Apple Music or Spotify].
This week’s community discussion for paid subscribers:
If we’re going to praise the public sector, why not pair it with a few good pot shots at the private sector? Tomorrow (Wednesday) paid subscribers will be nominating candidates for The White Pages Most Aggravating Corporation Award. By “most annoying” I don’t necessarily mean “most evil” (although causing death and poverty is indeed pretty annoying).
Have we done a similar prompt in the past? Yes.
Am I just looking for an excuse to continue my blood feud with the AT&T Corporation (who once told me that the reason why our home internet wasn’t working was that one of their technicians had “placed our wires in a pool of water”)? Perhaps! But I think it’ll still be fun.
Want to hang out with us but can’t afford a subscription? Just send me an email at garrett@barnraisersproject.org and I’ll comp you, no questions asked.
This is the best piece on Tax Day in a while! Garrett -- I have no idea how you manage to cover all the dark stuff and land on the bright side, but it’s so appreciated
This is a great post. It is both hilarious and informative (the Finnish baby boxes!). It made me want to wake my father from the dead so I could win this argument decisively (even though I was right along). And that is funny, too, because I generally do not care about winning arguments. I'm a proud, retired public servant. If I were still in a classroom today, I would make my students read this.