For as long as the editors of this journal can remember, the broad left has been on the back foot about taxes. Barack Obama in 2012 said that “if you make less than $250,000 a year, like 98 percent of American families do, your taxes shouldn’t go up.” By the time Joe Biden was President, that promise had extended to families making $400,000. 

This defensiveness is one tooth in a ratchet of anti-tax, anti-government sentiment that’s been plaguing this country for decades. Taxes are reduced, government services worsen, citizens are frustrated at the worsened services and want to pay less taxes, taxes are reduced, and on and on. It won’t do, and that’s true whether you’re a centrist who’s worried about our escalating national debt or a socialist who wants to pay for single-payer health care.

So this symposium, part of our Next Agenda series, takes two tacks: why we need more tax revenue, and how to raise it. Yes, adding a financial transactions tax, a wealth tax, and a consumption tax, but also making average Americans’ experience with the IRS less stressful and closing loopholes so that everyone at the 50th percentile knows that the people at the 99.9th percentile aren’t getting a better deal. 

In a different era of liberalism, Franklin Roosevelt said that “Taxes, after all, are the dues that we pay for the privileges of membership in an organized society. As society becomes more civilized, government—national, state and local government—is called on to assume more obligations to its citizens.”

And so we assembled a murderer’s row of tax experts to lay out how we can restore fairness, yes, but also how we can make our society a little more civilized.