The tax covenant—idealism and reality

St. Matthew, the tax collector.
Source.

I remember Walter Mondale's acceptance speech as the Democratic party candidate to challenge U.S. President Ronald Reagan in the 1984 general election—particularly these lines:

By the end of my first term, I will reduce the Reagan budget deficit by two‑thirds. Let's tell the truth. It must be done, it must be done. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did.

The idealism in these few sentences (about the need to reduce the deficit by increasing revenue, and the pointed willingness to be candid) did not serve Mondale well in his losing campaign. But I admired the thought.

In my blog post last year on the tax covenant, I summed up the ideal of righteous taxation this way:  Ideally, by paying taxes, we citizens are simply upholding a covenant we have with each other.

We have made promises to each other—"to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity" (preamble to the U.S. Constitution), setting up a government for these purposes and assigning that government, through our legislature, the practical tasks needed to fulfill those promises.

We know that these tasks cost money, so our legislators make a list of those costs and institute sources of revenue, including taxes. That's the covenant: to decide on the tasks needed for the "general Welfare," from which we all benefit, directly or indirectly, and to pay our fair share for those tasks.

Now we all know it's not really that simple. The best machines can get sand in the gears, and no human organization is completely free from inefficiencies and waste. Worse than that, when you have big streams of money going by, there'll usually be some people with buckets, trying to catch some along the way. That's why we have audits and inspectors general, but even in the best systems, we know that we won't achieve total perfection in getting the revenue to its promise-fulfilling destinations. Even so, by and large, the tax covenant can still hold. During Bill Clinton's presidency, the federal government ran a surplus four times, taking four small bites each year out of the federal debt.

The reason I'm so stubborn about preaching up this covenant is that for generations, populist politicians have been trading on the unpopularity of taxes. (Just think of how unpopular tax collectors were during New Testament times, although it didn't help that, in those times, the tax collectors themselves took a cut from the revenue.) It's convenient for those politicians to overlook the link between revenue and the legitimate expenditures approved by the people's representatives. I want that link to be strong and evident.

Then along comes a figure of such monumental disregard for common decency and legal norms, along with an animal magnetism for which J.D. Vance's ten-year-old epithet of "cultural heroin" is not too strong. It turns out that this personality can drug even legislators to the point of impotence. He has now gained the U.S. presidency a second time, despite the Founding Fathers' warnings against the rise of demagogues who rise by "flattering the prejudices of the people."

I'm guessing that, if you're read this far, you are probably not a follower of this figure and his MAGA movement. But how does all this specifically endanger the tax covenant?

We are (or should be!) willing to pay for the expenditures that our elected legislators have approved, and for the means to reduce wastage and corruption in the process. (If we don't like what they've approved or how the money is spent, we should be ready to replace those legislators and/or strengthen the safeguards.) But what should we do when the money is redirected or expropriated by the most powerful man in the system?

What if millions and billions of our tax money are being misspent to:

• replace a congressionally-mandated bipartisan 250th birthday celebration for the country with a celebration centered on the president, partly using money diverted from the bipartisan events?
• demolish the East Wing of the White House, deceptively promising that private contributions will finance the replacement?
• repair and refurbish the National Mall's Reflecting Pool through a no-bid contract, announcing grandiose goals for the project at a fraction of the still-increasing cost?
• pay for operations at the U.S. southern border, including stretches of the border wall, with money intended for military housing and schools?
• pay his own properties to house his security details for his numerous golf holidays?
• upgrade a gift airplane from another country (a gift already of dubious legality), to bring that airplane up to Air Force One standards? (At least $400 million, perhaps much more.)
• begin a war of choice with Iran?

Few of these acts, taken singly, are unique to the present administration, but the scale is unprecedented. Among the rest of us, it's the cynicism generated by not knowing where our tax money is actually going that worries me. And aside from such direct defiance of legislative decisions, we see an apparent utter lack of concern for the transfers of wealth from the 99% to the 1% resulting from the "Big Beautiful Bill" and the lack of attention to the national debt.

Finally, there are all the instances of corruption, self-dealing, and conflicts of interest that come across our news channels, perhaps beyond our ability to keep track. But it's worth paying attention, if only to keep referring back from today's swamp to the cleansing vision of that most basic American covenant: a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. For that ideal, I'll stubbornly continue to resist the cheap wisdom of cynicism.

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Brian Baugus on a biblical view of taxation.

Rosa DeLauro on Trump's record of corruption.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington lists some of the president's conflicts of interest.

My own thoughts on hope and cynicism.

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Nancy Thomas: The Lord's Prayer for Ukraine.

Kristin Du Mez on the Moscow, Idaho, pastor whose influence reaches the Pentagon.

Cape Verde's goalkeeper Vozinha: Amy Young's World Cup parable.

God Bless the Grass: The Lamb’s War as Endless Revolution, a presentation by C. Wess Daniels, available online on August 10, 7:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Michael K. Marsh on Abraham, Isaac, and sacrificing our certitude.

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Canadian content! The Whitehorse version of "Baby What You Want Me to Do?"