In My Tax Dollars, Ruth Braunstein maps the contested moral landscape in which Americans experience and make sense of the tax system. Braunstein tells the stories of Americans who view taxpaying as more than a mundane chore: antigovernment tax defiers who challenge the legitimacy of the tax system, antiwar activists who resist the use of their taxes to fund war, antiabortion activists against “taxpayer funded abortions,” and a diverse group of people who promote taxpaying as a moral good.
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.
As My Tax Dollarsshows, taxes are sometimes mundane. But they are not merely mundane. In some moments, and within some communities, the practice of paying taxes is lifted out of the mundane plane of ordinary life and infused with special moral significance that can be encoded with positive (sacred) or negative (profane) meaning. At the same time, there are also some actors who benefit from denying these moral meanings (like tax shirkers), and work to reassert the mundanity of taxpaying.
When we accept the premise that tax debates are just about tax rates, we aid those who benefit from this mundanity; we miss the deeper moral meanings that taxes carry for many Americans; and we miss opportunities for robust conversations about what kind of society we seek to build together.
Americans demonstrate unusually high levels of tax compliance, but there is also a strong culture of tax-related protest in the US. How do you make sense of this seeming contradiction?
RB: Yes! This contradiction is central to understanding taxpaying in the US, and was one of the puzzles that motivated this research. How can taxes be mundane, boring, impersonal, technical, just business; but also the lifeblood of the body politic; and also a beast sucking the life from citizens. We talk of taxes as though they are a mere annoyance to be withstood or avoided and like they are a matter of life and death. We talk of taxpaying as though it is a badge of honor and also like it is a crime.
What I argue is that all of these meanings circulate in American politics. They have been developed and promoted by groups from the far left to the far right. But once these meanings are out there, they reverberate through American taxpaying culture; ricocheting from the fringes to the mainstream and back again. And they are thus available to be taken up, sometimes in contradictory ways, by varied groups who wish to influence tax policy.
My Tax Dollars follows three of these groups closely—antigovernment tax defiers who challenge the legitimacy of the tax system, antiwar activists who resist the use of their taxes to fund war, and antiabortion activists against “taxpayer funded abortions.” It also documents a wide range of campaigns over the past century that promoted taxpaying as a moral good. Across all of their differences, the people I profile are all practiced and comfortable expressing their views about taxpaying in explicitly moral terms, and thus serve as invaluable guides to the richly textured moral landscape in which Americans make sense of taxpaying.
You are a sociologist of religion. Why a book about taxpaying?
RB: It’s a great question. I am mindful that I am treading into a conversation that has historically been led by various kinds of tax experts, like those who specialize in tax law, accounting, and tax policy. I am not one of those — in fact, like most Americans, I rely on an accountant to do my own taxes (and also tend to put it off to the last minute)!
But I think I am able to bring a distinctive perspective to the issue. As a scholar of religion and politics, I could not help but see something distinctly religious-ish in how Americans approach taxpaying. Taxpaying embeds individuals (and their money) in something larger than themselves and over which they do not have full control. As with much of religious life, taxpaying is mostly quite dull and routine, but it can also stir us to passion and reflection on what we value and what kinds of citizens and communities we are or wish to be. Taxpaying is a ritual practice that we perform as individuals, together. Submitting a tax form has no intrinsic meaning but through this ritual is imbued with complex and contested moral meanings around which rival groups of Americans coalesce and over which we are willing to fight.
I am not arguing that taxpaying is literally a religious act. But taxpaying plays a role in civic life that is quite similar to the role some religious practices play within faith communities. When we look at this way, we actually see that civic life is a pivotal site—alongside religious settings and others—where meaning is made, contested, and enacted in practice. In a pluralistic and politically polarized country such as the United States, multiple visions of the sacred circulate and compete for adherents. Civic rituals such as taxpaying become stages on which Americans battle over these rival visions of the sacred.
Though the book is called “my tax dollars,” you dedicate a chapter of the book to other kinds of money. Why was this important to include?
RB: We often overestimate differences between “tax dollars” and other dollars. But regardless of the form that money takes, it can carry intense moral meaning that shapes how people approach economic exchanges.
As I learned more about the individuals involved in different forms of tax-related protest, I learned that their tax-related practices are often part of a broader approach to money that is geared toward both avoiding the profane and using their money to pursue their visions of the sacred. They engage in scrupulous consumption and investing, boycotts and buycotts; prioritize direct donations to individuals and organizations; and experiment with cryptocurrencies. Regardless of the method, they reveal the widespread practice of using one’s money as a tool of power, protest and piety.
You draw on a wide range of data in this book? Why was that necessary?
RB: Let’s just say I took an expansive approach to collecting evidence of how Americans interact with the tax system, both materially and symbolically. In addition to the detailed case studies of the activist groups mentioned earlier, which are based on interviews, observations, archival and other public materials, I also delved into national public opinion surveys, tax history, and current political debates. I also took seriously how ideas about taxes circulated through everyday objects like road signs, buttons, posters and civic education manuals. Even pop culture can tell us a lot about our views of taxpaying. You’d be surprised by how frequently taxes come up in novels, television shows, political cartoons, and even popular music. You don’t write songs about things that are dull and boring; you write songs about things that move you deeply. And that, it turns out, includes taxes.
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 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.
About the Author
Ruth Braunstein is associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut and the author of Prophets and Patriots: Faith in Democracy Across the Political Divide.