Americans don’t hate taxes, they hate paying taxes
By Dennis Ventry, School of Law, University of California, Davis
Americans hate taxes. The burden of supporting wasteful government programs is too much to bear, far exceeding the weight borne by citizens of other industrialized countries. At least that is what politicos and pundits tell us. It is also what the “patriots” of the Tea Party movement declare as fact. And it certainly animates the rhetoric and propaganda of anti-tax fomenters since the founding of the republic. After all, the birth pangs of the nation originated in the Boston harbor with a protest over heavy taxation on imported British tea.
It turns out that none of the foregoing is true. Americans do not hate taxes. They never have. Instead, they hate what they get in return (or at least what they think they get in return). That includes not just the over-priced, low-quality benefits of civilization, but also the unduly burdensome process of paying for those benefits. The awful, complex, plain-English-be-damned, anxiety-ridden process of remitting payment to the government in exchange for public goods that taxpayers, alternatively, vilify or view as birthrights. Nor is it true that Americans hate government. Rather, they hate government that commands rather than enables, that occupies the breach rather than steps into it. Indeed, with particular respect to their federal government, Americans prefer inconspicuous to conspicuous, invisible to visible, or as one historian of the American political tradition recently put it, Americans prefer government that is “hidden in plain sight.”
Guided by these premises—that is, Americans do not hate taxes but rather the process of taxpaying and coercive tax regulation, both of which generate mistrust and misunderstanding of government—this Article offers a pathway for reforming tax preparation and filing. It explores the long-forgotten concept of “tax consciousness,” both from the perspective of its early proponents and how improvements in tax filing can achieve robust, modern tax consciousness. Moreover, its plan for reform promotes consciousness among taxpayers by leveraging technology and the government’s core competency for inventorying taxpayer data in order to make tax preparation and filing less burdensome, more user-friendly, electronically secure, customer-oriented, and even gratifying. Finally, the Article discusses how a reformed taxpayer-government interface can facilitate the submission and processing of tax returns and also educate taxpayers as to what taxes purchase as well as who among them is getting civilization at a discount.
