A decoder ring for our moment
And my favorite movie about taxes and the multiverse
This week, readers of this newsletter were treated to a bonus issue in honor of Tax Day, which also happened to be publication day for my new book about… you guessed it. Taxes! That is also going to the theme of our newsletter this week.
Don’t worry, no math is involved.
First up, I was honored to speak with Princeton University Press about the book, and I want to share some of the big takeaways from that interview.
What is the big idea you want people to take away from this book?
Ruth Braunstein: If readers take away one idea from this book, it’s that tax debates are rarely just about tax rates.
Tax debates are proxy battles in a much bigger war over the social contract itself—over the proper role of government, how we ought to relate to one another as citizens, and what we collectively hold sacred. This vision of tax debates, and taxpaying itself, stands in stark contrast to our typical vision of taxes as a mundane fact of life; as dull and routine; boring and technical.
[…]
How do the ideas in the book connect to current policy debates?
RB: This book is based on nearly a decade of research and discusses events and individuals from throughout the past century. But the ideas it uncovers have never been more current. Each of the activist communities profiled in the book are having a moment:
Antigovernment tax defiers who have long challenged the legitimacy of the tax system and demonized the IRS are seeing their ideas championed by leaders of the Republican Party, and DOGE’s dismantling of the IRS is a fulfillment of their longtime goals.
Antiwar activists who resist the use of their taxes to fund war are attracting interest from a new generation that is mobilized to end the war in Gaza; as well as a wide range of people who see tax resistance in general as a potentially powerful method of resisting the current administration.
Finally, antiabortion activists are ramping up their efforts to end “taxpayer funded abortions.” Bills to defund Planned Parenthood also increasingly include provisions to redirect public funds to crisis pregnancy centers and other religious anti-abortion organizations.
At the same time, some abortion rights organizations are developing new messaging campaigns to directly respond to these efforts, including calls for supporters to proclaim that they want their tax dollars to support comprehensive reproductive healthcare, which includes abortion care.
My hope is that My Tax Dollars can provide a decoder ring for many of these current debates.
The interview also covers such topics as why a sociologist of religion would write a book about taxes, how our ideas about taxpaying connect to our ideas about other kinds of money, and why we should take seriously pop culture references to taxes (more on that below!).
Check out the entire interview here.
One Thing™️ of the week
We can’t all do everything — but we can do one thing each week
Libertarians like to frame Tax Day as a demeaning ritual of citizens’ servitude to a violent state.
But we can also think of Tax Day in more empowering terms—as an annual opportunity for the American people show their leaders who’s in charge and to take stock of what we have built together (the good, the bad, and the ugly). What if we translated that idea into action this week?
Here’s a few ideas from the essay I shared on Tax Day :
Whether through protests in the streets, letters to the editor of local newspapers, or quieter conversations with friends and families, these are opportunities to consider what citizens owe their government and vice versa; to consider what citizens owe one another; and to assess whether our current tax system is set up to honor those relationships as we understand them. These are opportunities to debate different visions of how this should work, and to hold our leaders accountable. And it is an opportunity to collectively celebrate what we have accomplished together, and how much work is left to be done.
[…]
Taxpayers may not receive a sticker when they file their taxes, as voters do when they leave their polling place on Election Day. But marking Tax Day nonetheless offers taxpayers an annual opportunity to recognize an important source of our power and a key way we are bound together as members of the national community. Let’s not let it go to waste.
What I’m consuming
Here are the smart people I’m reading/watching/listening to
One of the most incredible pop culture treatments of taxpaying that didn’t make it into the book is the film Everything Everywhere All At Once. This film, which won seven Oscars, involves family drama, martial arts, comedy, and even the multiverse! But at its core, it is a story about a Chinese-American family whose tedious battle with the IRS causes their chaotic multigenerational household – and the universe – to shatter.
The family lives in a cluttered apartment above their laundromat business. This seems to be one clear source of their tax problem—the blurry boundary between home and work, which in IRS-speak means between personal and business expenses. The main character of the film, Evelyn Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh), lives in a state of frenzy. She dashes back and forth between the laundromat and her desk; she sifts through piles of receipts and tax forms. She sweats. She looks like she may be “doing it all,” or else like it’s all about to come crashing down. And then it does. Kind of.
As the film gained in popularity, one quote-turned-meme was ubiquitous: “In another life,” her husband says to her, “I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.” Laundry and taxes. How quaint; how mundane. And yet, as the movie shows, taxes are never just about taxes. (Laundry, of course, is never just about laundry either—just ask the person in your household who does most of it).
In those piles of receipts, Evelyn sees her hopes and dreams; all the money she spent in order to be (or at least appear) successful. But in those same piles of receipts and the audit notices from the IRS, she is also forced to confront her messiness and failures and disappointments—in her life, her business, her status as a so-called “model minority” in the US.
The bureaucracy of the American tax system makes each of us legible to the state. But it also makes us legible to ourselves. Tax season is a time of accounting. Literally, in the math sense, but also of a more personal sort. As we sift through bank statements and tax forms, recording what we earned and what we spent, the number of our dependents and our acts of charity, it is hard not to reflect on who we had hoped to be and who we have became; of where we fit into our family and in the world; of what we owe each other and what is owed to us in return.
I love this movie. I also love this introspective article, which calls it “an immigrant horror story about tax season,” but concludes “EEAAO exposes Asian America’s most embarrassing insecurities and loves us anyway.”
Latest News
If you’re not sick of me yet, a round up of more words from yours truly
Did I mention I have a new book out?
P.S. This song, “I Paid My Income Tax Today” was written by the hit song-writer Irving Berlin and donated to the Treasury Department to help raise tax revenue to support the war effort during WWII.
Something Light
A little palette cleanser before you go
If you’re a fan of The New Yorker’s editorial cartoons, this one’s for you. The magazine has created an online game called Laugh Lines that shows you a handful of old editorial cartoons and asks you to place them in chronological order. This week’s game involves several cartoons about …. taxes! Not to brag, but I did get a perfect score.
If that wasn’t enough tax-related humor for you, The New Yorker has published TONS of tax-related cartoons over the years. Many are featured in this gallery. But you can also just search the website and find more. I am personally partial to this one, which combines all of my favorite topics.
Let me know if you have a favorite in the comments!
If you’ve enjoyed this post… please subscribe to Democracy is Hard and share it with someone who may also enjoy it.
Thanks for this article! I can't wait to read the book. I totally wanted to see this image in real life. Here is the decoder ring! https://imgur.com/a/c5zxOxL