The Power to Destroy
How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
How the antitax fringe went mainstream—and now threatens America’s future
The postwar United States enjoyed large, widely distributed economic rewards—and most Americans accepted that taxes were a reasonable price to pay for living in a society of shared prosperity. Then in 1978 California enacted Proposition 13, a property tax cap that Ronald Reagan hailed as a “second American Revolution,” setting off an antitax, antigovernment wave that has transformed American politics and economic policy. In The Power to Destroy, Michael Graetz tells the story of the antitax movement and how it holds America hostage—undermining the nation’s ability to meet basic needs and fix critical problems.
In 1819, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that the power to tax entails “the power to destroy.” But The Power to Destroy argues that tax opponents now wield this destructive power. Attacking the IRS, protecting tax loopholes, and pushing tax cuts from Reagan to Donald Trump, the antitax movement is threatening the nation’s social safety net, increasing inequality, ballooning the national debt, and sapping America’s financial strength. The book chronicles how the movement originated as a fringe enterprise promoted by zealous outsiders using false economic claims and thinly veiled racist rhetoric, and how—abetted by conservative media and Grover Norquist’s “taxpayer protection pledge"—it evolved into a mainstream political force.
The important story of how the antitax movement came to dominate and distort politics, and how it impedes rational budgeting, equality, and opportunities, The Power to Destroy is essential reading for understanding American life today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
How did the U.S. economy go from its post-WWII prosperity to decades of increasingly burdensome personal and national debt? In this insightful and disturbing analysis, Graetz (Death by a Thousand Cuts), a law professor at Columbia and Yale universities, links that decline to increased hostility toward taxation. The 20th-century antitaxation movement first began to see results in California, with the passage in 1978 of Proposition 13, which limited the taxation of property; the law was estimated to have cost California's state and local governments over half a trillion dollars by 2000. Antitaxation sentiment was further fomented by Ronald Reagan in his 1980 and 1984 presidential campaigns, and by other Republican politicians, including Newt Gingrich. Despite growing evidence that the very rich often paid little to no tax—2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump touted his low tax bill as evidence that he was "smart"—antitaxers continued to demonize the IRS and oppose sufficiently funding the agency's pursuit of tax cheats and evaders. Through his accessible presentation of recent decades of political battles over interconnected issues, such as the right's fight for the tax-exempt status of religious schools and its pushback against the IRS's 1971 policy that tax-exempt schools must be racially nondiscriminatory, Graetz effectively makes the case that antitaxation has been "the most overlooked social and political movement in recent American history." This is a must-read for those concerned about the U.S. economy's growing reliance on debt.
