00:04:43.580We have a lot of disagreements in our country, and we all need to figure out a way to live together.
00:04:48.960But we also, despite that commitment to pluralism, are a very individualistic culture.
00:04:54.900And we are deeply committed to the idea that as individuals, we have both a right and a responsibility to kind of protect our own interests and our own thriving.
00:05:06.980And the unit of analysis for Americans is so often the individual rather than the community.
00:05:13.260And so that's a real tension to be committed to both individualism and pluralism, and then
00:05:18.300also to be as diverse and large a society as we are.
00:05:21.680And so those are questions that always come up in my work, and just every project I've
00:05:25.920ever worked on comes down to that sort of tug of war.
00:05:29.100And there's really no issue I can think of that crystallizes some of the tensions that
00:05:34.500that creates more than when we talk about taxes.
00:05:37.460I also think, and just because of when we're recording this episode, when we're talking
00:05:41.260about this, like, when people gesture to the degradation of our societal fabric in the United
00:05:53.980States right now, it seems to me that they are talking a little bit about a failure to keep
00:05:59.640those ideals of pluralism and individualism in tension. Some people think we have gone too far
00:06:05.940to one side of tolerating pluralism and some people think that we have gone too far in terms
00:06:12.080of individualism but I also think and this is the hard thing always for me when I'm trying to
00:06:16.680understand fierce individualism is that I could understand it in as it's manifest in like the
00:06:23.900libertarians where I grew up in rural Idaho who really are like not only do I want freedom from
00:06:31.320taxes that ask me to pay for things that don't benefit me but I also don't care what you do in
00:06:38.000your home right like they legitimately thought like you can practice whatever religion you want
00:06:43.360you can have sex with whoever you want you can smoke marijuana right but that that tolerance
00:06:50.620of difference like that tolerance of other individuals actions it's like I want to be0.74
00:06:55.360able to do whatever I want to do but I also want everyone else to do what I want to do too
00:07:00.760right oh absolutely yeah I mean there's a there's a kind of anarchistic strain that we see run from
00:07:08.060the far left to the far right that would say that everyone should just be allowed to do whatever
00:07:13.240they want to do without interference from the state or from other kinds of institutions including
00:07:19.680religion and even though some of the current administration is inflected with some libertarian
00:07:27.320ideas about taxes and small government, there's, you know, the rest of the agenda, right, is a very
00:07:35.300far cry from a live and let live kind of ethos. It's really much more aligned with a kind of
00:07:40.880Christian nationalist desire to create a society that is built around a single religious ideal
00:07:48.240and to prioritize the people and the ideas that are part of that in-group. And that's really not
00:07:55.240libertarian. And so it's interesting, you know, I wrote about, you know, the far right anti-tax
00:08:00.440movement, and it's really a place where these kind of Christian nationalist ideas and these
00:08:05.080libertarian ideas get fused historically and start to make sense sort of for a lot of people
00:08:11.680on the right as being connected in a way that logically they're kind of not. Can you say a
00:08:17.240little bit more about that? Like, how does it come to make sense? Because I think this is really
00:08:21.380important. I think sometimes people, if they, when people espouse beliefs that are very foreign to
00:08:27.800them, they're like, well, this just is totally nonsensical. But when someone believes something
00:08:32.100that fiercely, they have come to make it make sense to them. And underlining the ways in which
00:08:37.740that process happens is so important. So I would love to hear a little bit more.
00:08:42.140Yeah. I mean, one of the issues is that when the far right today or the right, the right more
00:08:46.700generally talks about resisting the state and resisting big government and resisting all the
00:08:54.680obligations that come with being a citizen of a country that is run by democratic institutions.
00:09:00.780It's largely resisting the version of the state that they view as serving people outside their
00:09:07.680in-group. And so it's actually not resisting all the different ways that that government
00:09:14.380is serving the in-group and the interests of the in-group.
00:09:17.480And so when you talk to folks who are kind of see themselves as anti-statist,
00:09:24.320but also imagine themselves as trying to defend a particular vision of a Christian nation,
00:09:30.400there is a huge support for state interference with people's lives
00:09:35.480in order to, in their view, protect the Christian nation or promote its values.
00:09:42.280And so there's just this very clear sense that I'm for the state when it's for my group and I'm against the state when it's for others.
00:09:49.060And I also think that when we talk about in-group, out-group, what sometimes that gets mapped onto like a feeling of like I'm a valid American.
00:09:57.360I'm a real American. Right. Yes. And the people in the out-group are actually not Americans and thus their rights don't count.
00:10:03.880Absolutely. And in the context of a lot of these debates about taxpaying, the real American category gets mapped onto a taxpayer category. And so there's this idea that, oh, I'm a taxpayer and those other people out there are not real taxpayers or are not paying as much as me or are, you know, kind of these drags on the system.
00:10:28.940That, you know, I'm paying in and they're taking. And the idea of dividing the society into payers and takers is very sort of central to a kind of modern libertarianism that comes out of Ayn Rand and, you know, the sense that there's this creator class that is supporting society and everyone else is just trying to take, take, take from it.
00:10:52.760And I always like the fault lines always become so visible when like you point out that undocumented people pay taxes, right?0.96
00:11:00.360So much taxes and don't actually get to get the benefits from it.1.00
00:11:05.400OK, so we've already gotten into some of the feelings that we have about taxes, but this episode is about other people's feelings as well.
00:11:12.580Um, you know, when you emailed me about potentially doing this episode, I was like, absolutely. This is like, I always want to talk about taxes and our feelings about taxes. And like, how do we talk to other people about paying taxes? Because the rhetoric around taxes and like, why they matter is very important. But I also think sometimes, like, this is this is part of what I like about your work.
00:11:37.100like sometimes people on both sides of the political spectrum and I'm in like self-indicting
00:11:41.920here we don't make space for the frustrations that we have with what our tax dollars are doing
00:11:50.080and how we're wielding them and your work really engages with that so that's part of the reason
00:11:54.440that I wanted to have you on but we got fantastic questions from listeners we always have great
00:11:59.960questions but like I think they're very good this this time and I'm excited to go through them so
00:12:04.960Okay, this first one comes from Zoe, and Melody's going to read it.
00:12:09.660Why are Americans so weird about lower-income folks taking advantage of government loopholes,
00:12:15.060but not the ultra-wealthy? For example, I often hear about people under-reporting their income
00:12:20.400to qualify for food stamps or Medicaid, which is also very rare, spoken about with derision,
00:12:26.140while rich folks avoiding taxes and whatever else they do is being smart.
00:12:30.480We kind of teed a little bit of this up, but where would you take this first?
00:12:35.320Yeah, I mean, I think it's just so important to step back and recognize how much Americans today just really revere wealth and wealthy people and make assumptions about them and their worth and their merit and the fact that they must have had valuable skills and qualities in order to achieve their wealth and status.
00:13:02.900that allows us to give them a pass or assume the best intentions that they might have.
00:13:10.280And then we have the opposite impression of people who are low income, which is that they
00:13:16.200are less skilled, don't try as hard, less intelligent, less worthy. And so because we
00:13:23.700sort of make assumptions about people's worth and trustworthiness based on the amount of money they
00:13:30.860have, it makes it really easy to see why there's this inherent distrust of, you know, low-income0.92
00:13:37.300people trying to kind of cheat the system, right? Because it fits that broader stereotype. And a
00:13:44.860sense that, well, if wealthy people are going out of their way to avoid taxes, A, they're just
00:13:52.260working within the existing system. And so blame the system, not them. Or they're just smart. And
00:13:59.060that's actually how they got ahead in the first place is that they understood how to work the
00:14:03.540system and profit from it and so you're right it's a it's a complete double standard and the amount
00:14:09.740of money that is sort of caught like the amount of what's called the tax gap the amount of taxes
00:14:15.300that are not collected that are owed that is due to wealthy people avoiding taxes just absolutely
00:14:23.360is like a mountain compared to like a couple grains of sand from low-income people occasionally,
00:14:30.640you know, fudging their taxes, which is rare. And so, yeah, no, it's completely misplaced
00:14:37.460priorities. How much do you think this is connected to the resilience of the tenets of
00:14:43.040meritocracy and the persistence of the American dream as a guiding ideology and the idea,
00:14:48.960the corresponding idea that if you are rich, you are somehow morally successful, right? Like a rich
00:14:55.780person is doing things right and a poor person is doing things wrong. Like I know we have sometimes
00:15:01.740like these almost like a beatification of like the poor and the struggling who are like heads
00:15:08.200down doing their jobs as laborers. But I actually think that that is almost like when we as we've
00:15:14.560moved away from like valorizing labor and moved towards valorizing the accumulation of wealth,
00:15:21.880like the moral, the positive moral balance is almost transferred to the ultra wealthy,
00:15:30.200Absolutely. And it's, and in a way that has become, you know, where there used to be some
00:15:36.640kind of reverence for the very wealthy, particularly in the sense that they were
00:15:42.220viewed as like pillars in the community and job creators. But there was also a sense of
00:15:48.760not wanting to be too conspicuous about one's wealth, right, in order to maintain that kind
00:15:55.320of high moral status. That's gone today, right? Conspicuous consumption is in, right? Actually
00:16:01.420showing that you have sharp elbows and kind of get to the top in ways that are a little bit sneaky
00:16:08.600are in. And the idea is that you're just smarter. It's like a kind of state of nature that if you
00:16:15.940were able to succeed in this kind of wild west of capitalism, then you are to be revered. And that
00:16:23.840if you can't succeed, then you are weak. And so, you know, the sense that that wealth would come
00:16:31.400with any kind of moral obligation back to your community as sort of a contingency of being
00:16:38.260viewed in high moral regard is really kind of old-fashioned at this point. And I do think that
00:16:44.620that shapes how people see this in our willingness to excuse things like tax avoidance. And I have
00:16:51.040to say that, like, one of the big turning points was Donald Trump on the debate stage sort of
00:16:58.600saying, like, of course, I don't pay what, you know, I don't pay any more taxes than I can get
00:17:04.680away with, right? That's just smart. And people thought this would be a scandal. It was not.
00:17:10.540But that's the kind of thing that can really chip away at Americans' sense that, you know,
00:17:16.480everybody should pay their fair share because, you know, it replaces that with a sense of everybody
00:17:21.080should pay as little as they can get away with. Yeah. Even that idea, right? Like people thought
00:17:25.660it was going to be a scandal and it was not. When I think about scandal theory, which is something
00:17:30.520I've thought about a lot with celebrities and how something becomes a scandal or doesn't,
00:17:34.680To me, with Trump, what that underlines is that it actually what like it wasn't just that that statement reset the values.
00:17:41.720It's that the values had been reset so thoroughly that when he uttered that speech act, it was channeling what we already believed instead of like resetting them.
00:17:54.320Yeah, no, I mean, I think that so much of Trump was just recognizing that sort of the ground had shifted in our society and he gave permission for people to articulate things that they just hadn't felt comfortable articulating before.
00:18:11.980And so part of social change is sort of making things thinkable, then making them doable without social sanction. And he was kind of a part of doing both of those things. But, you know, the underlying desire for that was already there.
00:18:28.860And that's why his long lineage is so instructive too, right? Because it's like his career as a celebrity and all of his bankruptcies and like all of his crass doings, like all of it, right? Like he's a bad businessman who becomes a good businessman through like manipulating the system. But no one's like, oh, Trump is so good at business. I don't like, how do you make sense of that?
00:18:55.980Yeah, I mean, I think that, like, the ways that he has always made money have not been through, like, the fundamentals of business, but have been through grift, right?
00:19:05.920But he's made being a grifter actually seem like a form of success.
00:32:19.000Okay. Can you tell us more about how we came up with the idea of an estate tax and then what you think is happening in terms of age here?
00:32:27.160Sure. And I mean, I now want to do an entire project just talking to older people about the estate tax because this is fascinating.
00:32:35.320And so I don't have a perfect answer to the actual question.
00:32:37.280But, you know, I do always like to remind my students and other people when I'm talking about this that when you set up a society, like if you were to draw a society on a piece of paper from scratch and say, I want it organized this way, you are making a set of choices about how resources will be passed to one generation to the next that are really important.
00:33:00.020And so you could have a setup where when people die, all of their property goes to some sort of like central repository and gets redistributed out.
00:33:11.740Or you could have a system where when people die, all of their property goes to their children and stays in their family and allows their family to accumulate wealth over generations.
00:33:23.620And our society is very close to the latter, where, you know, we essentially say, again,
00:33:30.400because our unit of analysis in the United States is basically the individual and the
00:33:34.300family, we say what you earned is yours and your children's.
00:33:38.760And what that has meant is that wealth has, like, snowballed over generations, particularly
00:33:44.960for families who had wealth early in the 20th century.
00:33:48.240And those who didn't, didn't have access to those resources.
00:33:52.180And so what the estate tax does is it's an effort to kind of find a middle ground between those two where it says, okay, the vast majority of your property can be passed to your children as like your legacy, etc.
00:34:08.020But some of it is going to go back to a kind of communal pot that will be used to be redistributed in a variety of ways.
00:34:16.840And this is perceived by some Americans as essentially a fully communist, statist solution.
00:34:27.660And I think that part of what they're not recognizing is how much further you could go, right?
00:34:33.380And that's just a decision that a society has made.
00:34:37.500And so, you know, the estate tax is essentially that, you know, upon death, part of your estate is taxed.
00:34:43.560And, you know, I think that this is something that feels really abstract to young people because nobody's thinking about a – nobody's imagining that they might have a lot of wealth unless they're born very wealthy.
00:34:55.480And they're probably not doing that kind of estate planning.
00:34:58.180But as you get older, because money is such this fundamental foundational part of our identity as individuals and as Americans, my sense is that people come to see the resources that they have accumulated over the course of their life as the legacy that they leave for the next generation and as something that they're able to give to their children.
00:35:21.420and that it feels actually like something very personal being taken away from them,
00:35:30.600And so, you know, that's without having talked to all these folks in different places,
00:35:34.640my sense just based on how we do think about our identity in relation to money
00:35:39.760would say that that's part of what's happening at that stage of life.
00:35:44.160Okay, I have a theory, but first I want to have a quick side note
00:35:47.040just to define what we mean when we say that something is a progressive tax.
00:35:51.420Because I think it's sometimes I think I thought for a long time that that just meant like it's a leftist tax, which it is to some extent, but it also has a particular meaning in terms of how it functions.
00:36:02.660Can you say a little bit about that? Sure. Yeah. So often when we think of a progressive tax, it gets contrasted to a flat tax.
00:36:09.380So a flat tax would mean every single person pays the exact same tax rate.
00:36:13.400So think of a tithe, right, where everyone would pay 10 percent of their income for taxes, which seems very fair.
00:36:21.420except for the fact that for people who are sort of low income, 10% of their income is a huge
00:36:28.780proportion for them of what they need to survive. And they don't have as much cushion. They don't
00:36:34.360have as much extra. And so what a progressive tax says is that as you are wealthier, you pay
00:36:41.000a progressively higher proportion of your income in this case in taxes. And it's partly resting on
00:36:49.480the premise that as you are wealthier, you're not using 100% of your income in order to survive.
00:36:57.060And so you have more cushion to survive. And we know generally that especially as people have
00:37:02.120gotten way, way wealthier, right, that they're essentially hoarding cash, that there is no way
00:37:08.660in their lifetime they could spend the amount of cash that they have. And so, you know, the idea is
00:37:15.940that we should be thinking first about what do people need to survive? Then what do people need
00:37:22.140in order to live what we would consider kind of a good life? And then beyond that, that's kind of
00:37:28.460like icing on the cake that shouldn't necessarily be protected by the state in the public interest.
00:37:34.920Yeah. And the way I also think of it is like taxing as a way to bring more people
00:37:39.580to like a median point at like a healthy middle and it's no mistake in my mind that like when we
00:37:48.520had the highest percentage of income tax on the rich was also like coincided with the like the
00:37:54.140golden age of capitalism and the the robust rise of the middle class and all those different things
00:37:58.780right and now as we continue to think of like progressive taxes as somehow evil we also have
00:38:05.200like great wealth disparity and that sort of thing massive massive wealth inequality that has
00:38:10.460corresponded pretty much directly with the decline of the highest marginal tax rate and i think that
00:38:16.200people sometimes don't realize this because we're having you know we have these like knock down
00:38:20.220drag out fights about the tax rate and it's a question of whether it'll be like 30 or 35
00:38:26.640but like during the middle of the 20th century it was like 90 something percent like there was no
00:38:34.040reason to be rich. No. Like, that's what's so fascinating to me. I first encountered this when
00:38:38.800I was learning about star salaries, like Hollywood star salaries. They were like, well, it doesn't
00:38:43.920matter if I get paid more because it's just going to go to taxes. It's so cool. Yeah. I mean,
00:38:48.000there was this perspective that if you made over a million dollars at that time, right, which was
00:38:53.880basically a billion dollars today, right? Like, that's not actual math, but, you know, just like
00:38:58.400a huge amount of money, that you basically, all of that, everything you made over a million dollars
00:39:04.060should be taxed because there was just no need for anyone to have that much money. And, you know,
00:39:09.020this was obviously, there was a big debate about this, as you might imagine, but the debate was
00:39:12.700like, should it be 95% or 93%? You know, like that was the terms of the debate. And the wild
00:39:18.940thing, and one of the reasons why I constantly am like, the tax debates are not just about tax rates,
00:39:23.400is that our kind of the anti-tax movement in this country has only gotten stronger as those tax
00:39:31.180rates have fallen. Right. So you would think you wouldn't need as strong a movement if it's going
00:39:37.420from 90 percent to 30 percent. So interesting. And yet it's so interesting. Yeah. So there's
00:39:42.580there's something bigger going on. So quickly, my theory about why people as they age get more
00:39:48.420anxious about paying taxes. I think that we have such a poor Social Security net and Social Security
00:39:57.340has failed to. Social Security no longer on its own provides a living situation for most people
00:40:04.860as they age and as they retire. And the disappearance of the pension, there's just it's
00:40:11.140basically a very fraught and precarious moment for a lot of elderly people. And so even if they have
00:40:16.640a lot of money they are still terrified that they're going to run out of it yeah and some of
00:40:22.540this is health care costs and escalating health care costs some of this is like the fear that like
00:40:27.360if they go into a nursing home it's just going to take all of their money right and this is i mean
00:40:32.200there are a lot of different strategies in order to make it so that no your entire like all of the
00:40:38.500money that you have amassed does not get allocated to that and i think if we had a more robust
00:40:43.180retirement safety net. And that includes universal healthcare. We, I mean, we kind of do, but like
00:40:50.200Medicare is just now shot through with all sorts of holes and like actually very expensive in
00:40:55.900different ways. If you have to get supplemental plans and that sort of thing that some of it is
00:41:01.080about passing down wealth, but a lot of it is like, what if I live to 95? Absolutely. I have
00:41:07.240to hoard this. Of course. I mean, cause you can live to a hundred, you know, like this was
00:41:11.320unforeseen that people could live so long with a reasonably high quality of life. And I think
00:41:16.200you're right that the volatility of the current system that makes it so hard to know that like
00:41:23.640in 20 years, will there be Medicare? In 20 years, will there be social security? I mean, I think
00:41:30.200that social security, there's less of a question about, but especially with our healthcare system,
00:41:34.000it feels like pricing is so opaque. It's so unpredictable. You know, we know that most
00:41:38.780Americans are one health care crisis away from being in debt. And, you know, it's just I think
00:41:44.580you're right that it creates so much anxiety. And so there maybe just is this impulse, impulse to
00:41:50.740keep as much as you can on hand. And I will be very surprised if millennials don't age into this0.99
00:41:56.700demographic and are also incredibly averse to taxes because we are conditioned to precarity
00:42:03.060through just everything that we've been through. Yeah.
00:42:08.780the culture study podcast is sponsored by lola blankets so it's april 14th when we're recording
00:42:16.920this ad we are supposedly in spring but did you know that every night i fall asleep with like
00:42:24.140three blankets on top of me because it's still freaking freezing here in the pacific northwest
00:42:28.720there's going to be like a ton of snow in the mountains there's a frost warning i mean spring
00:42:35.140is not arriving, I am so happy to have my Lola blanket to keep me cozy. Also, my dogs are still
00:42:41.100like absolutely cuddling on it at every moment, which is what underlines to me that it is still
00:42:45.800actually winter, not spring. Lola is the world's number one blanket crafted with ultra soft
00:42:52.920luxury faux fur and a signature four-way stretch that sets it apart. It is the number one most
00:42:58.420desirable object in my entire home. I have things that cost so much more. I have things that are
00:43:04.300ostensibly so much fancier, but all anyone wants when they come over, they just want to sit with
00:43:09.700the Lola. I just washed mine the other day. It's double hem for durability. There's no fraying.
00:43:15.360There's no like, I don't know, broken stitches. It looks flawless. There's no pilling and there's
00:43:20.820no shedding, which is huge. Even after repeated washes, I have the large, which is perfect for
00:43:27.200me and myself and maybe battling for a corner of it with the dog. Melody has the extra large,
00:43:34.000which was the right choice. And I wish that I had that. There's a reason they call it the biggest
00:43:39.160blanket on the internet. They also make weighted blankets for calming therapeutic vibes and also
00:43:44.780matching pillows, which I covet tremendously. For a limited time, our listeners can get 40%
00:43:50.640off select Lola blanket products with code culture at checkout. Just head to lolablankets.com
00:43:56.120and use code culture to get 40% off your order. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you
00:44:01.160heard about them, please support our show and let them know that we sent you. I don't know,
00:44:05.780send me a pic of you with your Lola blanket. It'll be amazing. Wrap yourself in luxury with Lola
00:44:10.560blankets. Okay, next question. Also love this question. It comes from Jennifer and Melody's
00:44:23.380going to read it. I have always felt that charitable donations should not be tax deductible
00:44:28.100and never claim them or deduct them on my taxes because it defeats the purpose of making a
00:44:33.020contribution to then reap a tax benefit in exchange. My question is, would charitable
00:44:38.280giving really decline in the absence of tax deductions? So we have evidence about this,
00:44:44.540right? Over the last couple of years. We do. Yeah. I mean, I just want to say that I love
00:44:50.240that this person is like personally sticking to their values and not claiming this tax credit.
00:44:58.100And I hope there's lots of people out there like you who are really trying to kind of
00:47:31.560But there's lots of other reasons that people want to give to charity.
00:47:35.520And it's not just for the tax benefit.
00:47:37.560What's the genesis of the deduction? Because to me, it seems like a real, like a classic example of this idea that like we should be in private-public partnership in order to take care of one another.
00:47:49.320Yeah. So one of the really interesting things about the sort of creation of our modern tax system is that it was not necessarily built as a permanent tax system.
00:47:58.900It was built during World War I and then expanded during World War II as a way to raise money during the war.
00:48:09.180And so, again, like this is a – it was a solution to a problem that became a permanent feature of our political life and our political institutions.
00:48:19.060And during that time, when there was this need to raise, to create this mass income tax to raise money for the war, there was also concern that people who were being taxed at high rates would stop giving money to charitable organizations.
00:48:32.940And the United States has always had a really robust sort of civic sector or third sector, meaning a place where people are self-organizing through civic organizations and charities and other kinds of things in their communities outside of government.
00:48:49.560and so suddenly the government was going to be taking a bunch of money that would be used in
00:48:56.700ways that were creating these sort of collective resources in the form of the military but they
00:49:01.440still wanted to incentivize donations to those charitable organizations and and so this was the
00:49:06.740kind of compromise for that yeah and um you know i think that most people who think about the tax
00:49:13.100system would say that that sort of it is very healthy for our democracy to have this robust
00:49:18.040civic sector, where people are able to self-organize and money is able to flow
00:49:24.960in ways that aren't necessarily sort of channeled through the federal government. It gives communities
00:49:31.120autonomy. It allows for communities to sort of observe, you know, their own rituals and advance
00:49:39.280their own values. And so, you know, having both of those in balance is, I think, worth thinking
00:49:44.020about doing, but this was the solution to that. I feel like I could talk about this for an entire
00:49:49.800additional episode, including, like, I feel a very strong movement, at least that I've seen,
00:49:57.400like, in people with similar political persuasions, to stop tax-exempt status for religious
00:50:04.660organizations. When, as you point out, a lot of those religious organizations, the reason they're
00:50:12.020able to do the work that they're doing is because of that tax-exempt status. But then they're also
00:50:18.060like with that charitable work, there is also the ideological components. Absolutely. And is that
00:50:25.260just part of like the tacit agreement that we make in our particular society? Yeah. I mean,
00:50:31.900I think that part of going back to this idea that, you know, in a pluralistic society that
00:50:37.860has a lot of diversity of religious ideals and commitments and values, and also other kinds of,
00:50:46.520you know, kind of like ethnic groups that want to preserve their heritage and, you know, just lots
00:50:51.140of diversity and difference that in a pluralistic utopia, all of that gets respected. A lot of these
00:50:58.640civil society organizations are designed to advance these smaller scale communities' goals.
00:51:04.080and so on one hand we can think of those as being beautiful and sort of a necessary part of a
00:51:11.300pluralist society to allow people to like live there you know in their particular kind of
00:51:16.900community organized around their particular set of values at the same time sometimes those infringe
00:51:23.020on other people's values and so it becomes uh you know something that has to be negotiated
00:51:30.540in practice. It also, you know, some people would criticize this as sort of encouraging
00:51:37.900in-group bonding at the expense of kind of cross-group bridging. And, you know, I think that
00:51:46.240there's a place for both of those things, that, you know, one isn't necessarily better than the
00:51:51.960other. But if you only are doing one, right, if you're only bridging across differences, you might
00:51:57.260lose some of your cultural kind of distinctiveness that might be important for your family, right?
00:52:04.180You could lose language or religion or whatever. And if you're only doing bonding, right, with
00:52:11.000your in-group, then of course you're isolating yourselves from others and there's not that kind
00:52:15.160of mutual learning and knitting together of communities into this broader society.
00:52:19.220The other thing it makes me think of is that if we do collectively believe
00:52:24.180that there are some things that cannot turn a profit.
00:52:29.300And if we try to make them turn a profit,
00:57:48.120But yes, it is something that people think a lot about.
00:57:50.880And I should say that some folks in the anti-abortion movement
00:57:54.560also did this kind of tax resistance for a time right after Roe v. Wade was passed.
00:58:00.680And then they basically didn't have to after that
00:58:03.860because lawmakers created a set of provisions in the budget
00:58:08.360often associated with the Hyde Amendment and things like this that said that actually your0.89
00:58:12.780tax dollars can't be used to pay for abortion. A new provision was ever made to say your tax
00:58:18.840dollars won't be used to pay for war. And so the peace movement, you know, continued in this
00:58:24.420effort. But I do think that this, like the idea, what's a rule follower to do? You know,
00:58:30.160I do things that are illegal all the time. And like, I don't mean that to like sound like
00:58:35.120Like, I speed all the time. I drank before it was legal. I used marijuana before it was legal. You know, like, there are things that we decide match our moral codes, but not the legal code. And so, but sometimes the legal code is our moral code. How do you think about that, the difference there and how people can discern that?
00:59:01.980Yeah, no, I think that, you know, one of the things I loved about talking, I talked to a lot of war tax resistors and read a lot of their memoirs and spent a lot of time in their spaces.
00:59:11.200And, you know, one of the really fascinating things was the amount of discernment that they were doing around this question because they were thinking about things like, I really love for my tax dollars to pay for Medicaid and Social Security and the roads and X and Y and Z.
00:59:31.820But, like, I viscerally cannot allow my money to pay for a bullet in a war that could shoot a child.
00:59:41.200You know, and they would have these really visceral ways of imagining their specific dollar being transformed into a weapon of war that would kill a specific person.
00:59:53.820And so, you know, that to them was just completely morally untenable.
00:59:57.660And so they figured out, how do I try and do both, right?
01:00:02.700And they come up with lots of creative strategies.
01:00:05.380And so, you know, one of them is just complete non-payment of their taxes where, you know, it's an act of protest and the goal is to send a message to government that would hopefully force them to end that immoral war so that this wasn't a moral problem anymore.
01:00:19.960They've never really gotten enough scale to have that impact.
01:00:24.820Some of them do more kind of symbolic gestures where they refuse to pay the proportion of their taxes that, you know, is allocated to defense with the idea that, well, I'm paying the half that's going to life-affirming kind of services that the government provides.
01:00:42.080Some of them do a kind of token nonpayment as a form of protest that sort of makes them
01:00:47.620feel like, you know, they're bearing moral witness to the problems that they see in terms