EP 742 On the Lips of Republican and Democrats: No New Taxes

America was born in rebellion over taxes.  Remember the Boston Tea Party?  And then hundreds of years later in the 2010’s came the TEA Party, which stood for Taxed Enough Already.  However, that has been the mantra of the Republican Party for the last 50 years beginning with Proposition 13 in California, a property tax cap that Ronald Reagan hailed as “a second American Revolution.”  And while Republicans have been most identified with the continuing attempts to provide tax cuts, often to the rich, or make the IRS the villiain in many political scenarios, the Democrats, fearing backlash, have been timid in pushing back fearing voter anger in opposing Republican dogma.  And while neither party cuts spending while in office and both put more things on the federal credit card, evidenced by Donald’s Trump ballooning the national debt by $7 trillion, while saying he would erase it, that is how we have arrived at an unsustainable $32 trillion in debt.  And much of it, unlike a similar debt laden period after WWII, is owned by foreign interests.  Our guest, Michael Graetz, a professor emeritus at Columbia Law School and Yale Law School and a leading authority on tax politics and policy, and the author of “The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America” feels that the modern anti-tax movement is the most overlooked social and political movement in recent U.S. history.

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