Because I live and drive in the District of Columbia, my license plate bears the motto “Taxation without representation.” (Since 2017, the motto has acquired a verb, so it is now a demand: “End taxation without representation.”)

That familiar phrase, attributed to James Otis during the conflict over the Sugar Act in 1764, not only misquotes Otis, as Vanessa Williamson observes in her new book The Price of Democracy, but also oversimplifies the relationship between taxation and democratic representation. It is not a simple transaction of one for the other. Like most D.C. residents, I pay my federal taxes without objection—we pay more per capita in federal income taxes than any state—but I deserve representation not because I pay my taxes, but because I’m a human being subject to all the laws of the United States.

A senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author with Theda Skocpol of the best book about the rise of the Tea Party, Williamson reveals all the complexity and nuance in the interplay between taxation and citizenship since the colonial era. At times, paying taxes has been seen as a point of pride and a mark of full citizenship, while at other times it has been perceived as an unnecessary burden.

In a 2019 book, Read My Lips, Williamson drew on recent survey data to show that Americans were more positive about paying taxes than conventional wisdom would suggest. The central argument of this book isn’t as clear. “It’s complicated” is probably the best summary of the 300 years of American history traversed here, from familiar early conflicts such as the Stamp Act and Shay’s Rebellion through the tax revolts of our time,  but the reader will appreciate that taxation, including the social benefits of an adequately funded government, has been central to the definition of citizenship, no less than voting or forming political parties, at each turn in the long conflict over who is legitimately part of the American polity.

Taxation has at times represented great promise in the quest for equality of citizenship, for the economic and human development tax revenue could make possible, especially in the South and the West. It has also often been enormously popular. The social spending made possible by taxes, which enables people and families to thrive in the market economy by shielding them from its sharpest dangers, has what Williamson describes as “emancipatory capacity” that can itself support citizenship. It is no coincidence that the countries and states with the most progressive tax systems (Sweden and Finland, California and Maine, for example) tend to  have higher rates of participation in elections and other indicators of healthy democracy.

But at other times and places,  taxes such as state-level poll taxes (in the original sense of a regressive fixed tax for every person, unrelated to income or spending, as well as its later sense as a fee for voting) have served to reinforce social and economic hierarchies. While being a “taxpayer” has often been honored and, as in the D.C. license plate slogan, seen as legitimating a claim to democratic voice, those who don’t pay federal income taxes have been derided as “tax-eaters” or, as a Wall Street Journal editorial put it in 2002, “lucky duckies,” who are fortunate that they earn too little to pay federal income tax.

Like any story about citizenship and identity in U.S. history, taxation involves race in complicated ways. Taxation has long been treated as a formally color-blind zone of policy, and you won’t find much discussion of race in any tax policy textbook or white paper. Law professor Dorothy A. Brown’s 2022 book, The Whiteness of Wealth, did much to show how taxation reinforces racial inequality in our time; Williamson provides a deeper historical context. “Racism has been the single greatest ally of the antitax, antidemocratic elite,” she writes. Denunciations of “tax eaters” and “lucky duckies” also carried a racial connotation, much like the “welfare queens” of Ronald Reagan’s imagination. And as with so many such stories, the reader has to wonder why we failed or refused to put the racial context at the center until recently.

Unsurprisingly, then, the most detailed and revelatory part of the book is the long middle section that covers the fights over taxation in the period before and after the Civil War, up to the enactment of the modern federal income tax. That section begins with the story of Hinton Helper, whose 1857 book, The Impending Crisis of the South, was widely read. Though Helper himself was a racist, he called in the book for taxation of slaves as property as a means of ending the practice: “Abolition by taxation,” Williamson calls it. Taxation was as central as tariffs in the policy fights leading up to the Civil War and after. When the short-term federal income tax imposed by Lincoln during the war was repealed in 1872, the Gilded Age followed, and many states, especially in the South, refused to raise enough revenue to provide basic public services, leaving Black citizens and many poor whites in deep poverty and without schooling.

The history of taxation, in Williamson’s hands, is often the story of paths not taken. So much about life in the United States could have been so different, and better, both then and now. “Abolition by taxation” is one path not taken, along with wealth taxes, a national sales tax, and New York journalist Henry George’s proposal for a tax on unimproved land, which formed the basis of a vibrant social movement in the 1880s that can be difficult to appreciate today. The negative income tax, which would have provided cash support to all low-income working families with children and came closest to enactment in Richard Nixon’s failed Family Assistance Plan, is another missed opportunity, one that might have “united the working and nonworking poor” in a single benefit program without the stigma of welfare, Williamson says. (The refundable Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) offers a rudimentary version of that hope today.) The income tax itself represents a decades-long struggle dotted with failures, including an 1894 decision by a Supreme Court as reactionary as today’s that drew on an ambiguous constitutional provision to hold that any tax not apportioned by state population (that is, a poor but populous state would have to pay more than a small rich state) was unconstitutional.

That set the cause back for another two decades until the surprising success, boosted by the Populist movement, of the Sixteenth Amendment, ratified in 1913. It was not until the 1930s that taxation was extended beyond the very rich, that it largely supplanted tariffs—which have very different economic consequences and generate conflict between industries—as a source of revenue, and funded the kinds of supports, such as Social Security, that could connect people to government, lift them above destitution, and give them the security and time to participate as citizens.

Just as interesting as the missed opportunities are the times when taxation was widely popular and even cause for broad-based social movements. The period leading up to enactment of the income tax was one such moment, as were the years between World War II and the Reagan backlash, when individual and corporate income tax rates were high and relatively uncontroversial. Williamson attributes some of that openness to taxation also to the politics of race in that period when Black political representation was absent in the South and minimal elsewhere and in Congress. As long as it was white voters and politicians making the decisions about tax policy, there was less room for racialized hostility to the “tax eaters.”

But that period is now many decades past. Most of the people shaping political strategy or tax policy today have lived their adult lives in the shadow of the tax revolt of the late 1970s. The most basic political assumption, through the Clinton, Obama, and Biden Administrations, has been that anything that might be or seem like a tax increase is politically deadly. Meanwhile, any kind of positive goal was thought to be best structured as a tax deduction or credit, or worse, the kind of tax-preferred account, such as 529 accounts for college, that mostly benefit the wealthy, add great complexity, and take vast amounts of investment income out of the tax system entirely. “Democrats could never outflank Republicans on taxes; they could only give credence to the idea that the basic tasks of government—taxing and spending—were something to avoid,” Williamson writes.

One aspect of taxation and citizenship that isn’t given enough attention in the book is the way taxes shape the family, concentrating wealth at the top of society, leaving poorer families more vulnerable, and, in combination with other policies, reinforcing reactionary social norms.  On this topic, I’ve been influenced by the provocations of Australian sociologist Melinda Cooper, particularly her recent book Counterrevolution. Describing the many ways that the American tax system shields wealth in the family at the very top—a virtually nonexistent estate tax, preferences for capital gains, and tax-advantaged accounts—Cooper riffs on the title of a 1977 book by the then-popular historian Christopher Lasch: “The family is truly a tax haven in a heartless world.” Examples such as the recent takeover of CBS by David Ellison, son of multi-billionaire Larry Ellison, show how much economic and cultural power is concentrated in enterprises controlled by a single family, supported not only by the tax code but by weak regulatory and antitrust enforcement.

Williamson’s history doesn’t need a “chapter ten”—the term for the policy recommendations that often close out such a book—but she does conclude with a recommendation that taxes should be easier to file. She’s absolutely right that the burden of time and attention that tax filing demands is as much of a reason that people hate taxes as the amount they pay. It’s the one direct interaction most of us have with the federal government, and it is infuriating. Taxes at the low end, for families eligible for the EITC or people with considerable non-wage income, such as delivery app drivers, can be more complicated than they are for a well-off family with mostly income from formal employment. The costs of tax preparation often erode the benefits that the EITC and other credits are intended to provide, and congressional encouragement to reduce EITC error rates means that, as of 2017, those lower-income families were twice as likely to be audited than those with incomes above $200,000.

Taxes aren’t complex because government is dumb and inefficient; they’re complex because people in power have had an interest in keeping them complicated. A burdensome process fuels a broad base of resistance to taxes. And the lobbying power of tax preparation and tax software companies such as Intuit has long delayed the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from implementing and sustaining the successful, free Direct File program nationwide, never mind the simpler alternative that would have the IRS send an almost-complete tax return to most voters for them to correct and sign.

But tax preparation is also burdensome because we ask so much of the tax system and treat different forms of income and types of saving and investment so differently. My own chapter ten would go beyond filing and revive a long-forgotten tax tradition that can be traced from the Kennedy Administration through the dramatic tax reform legislation of 1986. In that vision, rates can be relatively low, though graduated and progressive, because all income would be treated the same, whether it’s from employment, capital gains, inheritance, “carried interest,” or other sources. Deductions, which provide more to those with higher incomes, should be avoided in favor of credits—and, particularly, refundable credits that reach those who don’t pay much in taxes, such as the EITC or the partially refundable child tax credit that was expanded during COVID but has since expired. In the north star vision, government would provide social and economic supports for health care and higher education directly, rather than through the tax system. The IRS would do its job of collecting taxes, and other agencies would do the spending.

During the Obama Administration, Warren Buffett pointed out the injustice in the fact that his secretary paid a higher average tax rate than he did. This led Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and others to develop the complex “Buffett Rule” legislation, which would add surtaxes on income above $1 million and $2 million. But it didn’t get at the basic reason Buffett’s tax rate is low: His income comes from capital rather than labor. If we taxed all income at the same rate, there would be no need for a special “Buffett Rule” that adds even more complexity.

It wouldn’t be quite this simple, because we’d need to decide what to do with unrealized capital gains—that is, stock gains that remain invested and not withdrawn for consumption. While taxation of unrealized gains is often portrayed as extremely complicated, I’ll note that Congress just imposed a tax on increases in university endowments, which are made up of unrealized capital gains, so it shouldn’t be so difficult to do the same for households. A real tax on wealth, one of those paths not taken over the course of our history, would be another valuable approach, and would more directly address extreme, racialized inequality.

But in this vision, taxes would remind us of Elizabeth Warren’s aphorism from the 2008 financial crisis, “Banking should be boring.” Taxes should be as boring as they were before the tax revolt era, tasked with the straightforward goals of raising revenue and ameliorating inequality.

It seems likely that when the current Administration recedes from power, it will leave behind a wreckage of much of our government. That will be disastrous, but it may also create an opportunity to rebuild without the constraints of Clinton-era assumptions, policies shaped by the choices and compromises of earlier generations, or the particular configuration of interest groups then or now. If we have the opportunity to reshape the tax system, we should be as ambitious as the progressives and populists who pushed for the income tax were more than a century ago.