No Labels Talks About Taxpayers

No Labels, the independent political organization making noises about a third-party presidential campaign, has released a policy manifesto. Intended to flesh out the group’s rhetorical commitment to common-sense solutions, the document has a lot to say about “taxpayers.”

Indeed, if you search the No Labels booklet for the word “tax,” you’ll find 19 occurrences. A few involve substantive discussion of fiscal policy, including Social Security, budgeting, and various tax credits.

But seven times, “tax” appears as part of “taxpayer.” And as Cornell University historian Lawrence B. Glickman has pointed out, “taxpayer” is a politically freighted term.

On the one hand, “taxpayer” is a straightforward description of someone who pays money to the government through a forced extraction of some sort. Taxes, after all, are not voluntary. Otherwise, we would call them gifts.

(If you’re so inclined, it’s actually possible to make a gift to the federal government through a special account at the Treasury Department, established in 1843 for “individuals wishing to express their patriotism to the United States.”)

“Taxpayer” is a word that applies to most people in this country, and it’s often basically innocuous.

But as Glickman points out, conservatives have used the rhetoric of the “besieged taxpayer” since the 1930s to delegitimize government spending. By focusing on the burden of taxation rather than the benefits of spending, critics of the New Deal used “taxpayerism” to gin up resistance. And the language of taxpayerism has been with us ever since.

In many respects, “taxpayer” has replaced “citizen” in modern political discourse. The word has become so commonplace that even many liberals and progressives use it uncritically. That’s defensible when “taxpayer” is used to describe someone engaged in the process of paying taxes, which is itself an important part of citizenship.

Taxpaying is central to what I and many other scholars call “fiscal citizenship,” the collection of rights and responsibilities that bind the state to the individual — and vice versa. We owe the state our taxes, and the state owes us things in return. (Prior analysis: Tax Notes Federal, Apr. 18, 2022, p. 356.)

When we talk about the act of paying taxes, then, it’s reasonable to talk about taxpayers. It would be hard to talk about the IRS, for instance, without talking about the taxpayers who engage with the agency — unless you insist on calling those people “customers,” which always strikes me as Orwellian.

But it’s not usually helpful to use the language of taxpayerism when talking about the role of government or the value of public spending. “Politicians should scrutinize how they spend money, and tax cuts should be part of the menu of economic policy,” Glickman has acknowledged. But when we talk only about “taxpayers” and rarely about “citizens,” we end up talking endlessly about cost and never about value.

To be fair, No Labels talks a fair bit about citizenship in its policy document — and not just in the sections about immigration. The group describes a commitment to civic virtue, shared sacrifice, and national purpose.

But No Labels has fallen into the trap of taxpayerist rhetoric, and ultimately, that trap will doom the sort of idealistic project that No Labels seeks to advance. “Taxpayerism has perverted our political culture by denying the existence of a common good,” Glickman writes. And he’s correct.

Americans will never forge a common-sense consensus until we focus more consistently on the notion of the common good.