The Great American Tax Revolt

0:00Hey, so we're not paying taxes this year, right? Until the Pentagon passes one damn audit, we shouldn't pay any more taxes.

0:10Noel King:People don't want to pay taxes anymore because they don't trust the way the government is spending and tracking our money. Americans are fed up with paying taxes. And I know, I know, but hear me out. Americans are extra fed up with paying taxes lately, according to some Gallup polling and some posting. But are we being short-sighted? I think that it's important to have a government. I think that humans tried anarchy for quite a long time, and it didn't work so well. A lot of people got hit over the head with rocks. We didn't have a whole lot of economic development. Almost everyone agrees that the United States should have a military to protect it from foreign invasion, that we should have law enforcement, firefighting, schools, etc.

0:54Noel King:Anti-taxers and where this could all be heading, coming up on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Atio, the A-I-C-R-M for modern teams. Atio connects to your email, calendar calls, product data, billing data, and more. So your CRM is always complete, always enriched, and always in sync. Bye, bye, bye. If you want a CRM built for how you want to work, you can check out Atio. You can go to atio.com slash todayexplained and you get 15 % off your first year. That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash Today Explained.

1:33This is Today Explained. My name's Eric Levitz, and I'm a senior correspondent for Vox, where I write about politics and the economy.

1:40Noel King:All right, so tomorrow is tax day, and Americans are feeling some type of way about their taxes this year, huh? Yeah, I would say that we as a country are in a pretty tax-negative sort of mood. You know, Gallup has this long-running survey data where they ask Americans, is the amount of money that you pay in taxes, federal taxes, too high, about right, or too low? And for a decent chunk of the 2010s, a plurality of Americans said it was about right. But that changed right around the pandemic. You know, in 2020, the share of Americans who said their tax burden was too high was 46%. By last year, that had jumped to 59%.

2:22And it's basically a continuous jump right after the pandemic. I'm a 20-year-old barber, and I owe the IRS$30 ,000 in taxes this year. I need to come on here and vent about taxes because I literally owe$3 ,400. What? Where does my money go? Why don't I have a say? Like, Social Security, why can't I opt out for that? And I think that what makes this really remarkable is that the Americans' discontent is not tracking the objective level of federal taxes. So in 2025, Americans are about as upset with their tax burden as in modern history. And yet at the same time, the actual amount of taxes that they're paying, the rates that they're paying, are the lowest in modern history or just about.

3:15All right.

3:15Noel King:So who is upset about taxes? Is this a Red America revolt? Is this a Blue America revolt? Yeah, so I think that obviously the Republican Party is always more hostile to taxes and, you know, Republicans, conservatives are going to express more aversion to them in polls. But what I think we've really seen and what's really significant is that both coalitions are trending in the same direction. You know, Democrats aren't quite as far along as Republicans are, but they're both moving towards more hostility towards taxes. Very interesting. OK, so let's discuss what Americans are doing about our hostility.

4:01Noel King:Let's talk first about predominantly red states, Republican led states. What's what's going on? Yeah, so since COVID, we've basically seen red states wage war on property taxes, especially. $18 billion in property tax relief is coming for Texas taxpayers up to the left. The average reduction in property taxes for Idaho homeowners is approximately 18%. Connie Werner is raking in the savings. As a homeowner whose primary residence is in North Dakota, Connie will get$500 back on her property taxes next year. Now Republicans are really building on that. So this year in Florida, state legislators have advanced a constitutional amendment that would phase out all property taxes for non-school purposes.

4:47Is it your property or not? Just for being on your property, you got to write a check to the government every year?

4:53Noel King:Wow. All right. So that's at the state level. I wonder about what's happening at the national level. So we had the big, beautiful bill. The Trump administration was clear that it hoped that, you know, come tax refund time, Americans, especially wealthy Americans, wealthier Americans, would be very happy with the results.

5:15so when you get your tax refund think about what a wonderful president you have no tax on tips no tax on social security for our great seniors no tax on overtime don't spend all this money in

5:30Noel King:one place what's um what's been up from the white house yeah so like you said last year The Trump administration, along with Republicans in Congress, enacted a tax cut bill that costs well over$3 trillion. Much of that was extending the tax cuts that Trump had enacted during his first term in office. But he also created new tax breaks on top of those, including the much ballyhooed no tax on tips, which Democrats have subsequently embraced as well. And, you know, I think that that's really indicative of this larger pattern that's kind of defined American tax policy in the 21st century, which is a Republican president gets in, George W.

6:21Bush in the early 2000s, cuts taxes across the board. We must give overcharged taxpayers some of their own money back. Eventually, Democrats get back into power. They preserve the tax cuts on everybody but the rich. In exchange for a temporary extension of the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, we're also able to protect key tax cuts for middle class families. Another Republican comes in and they cut everybody's taxes down even further, but especially for the rich. We enacted the biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history. And then Democrat comes in, preserves the new baseline that the Republicans have set for everybody but the wealthy.

7:01Come on, folks. And so there's this ratchet down over the 21st century where what is considered kind of the normal bipartisan conventional wisdom about how much middle class Americans should pay in taxes keeps going down. All right.

7:16Noel King:So Democrats, as you point out, historically less hostile to taxes than Republicans and historically like the kind of pro-government policies that require people paying taxes. So what are Democrats up to? Yeah, so, you know, historically, as you say, Democrats are the party of big government, quote unquote. You know, there's been a really contradictory sort of evolution within the party over the past couple decades where Democrats have kind of gotten more ambitious about what they want to do in terms of increasing government spending on social safety net programs. But they're also increasingly terrified of calling for taxes on anybody but the rich.

8:06We impose surtaxes on people who make more than a million dollars a year and billionaires, while we provide tax relief to hardworking Americans. No household in America should pay federal income tax on their first$75 ,000 of earnings. Keep your money. This is in part because the base of the Democratic Party has become increasingly affluent. You know, in the Trump era, college-educated voters shifted very strongly towards the Democratic Party, while non-college-educated voters shifted towards the Republicans. And so Democrats have never been more reliant on the upper middle class for votes than they are today.

8:49And that's led to things like, you know, under Obama, the Democratic Party's pledge was that it wouldn't raise taxes on anybody making less than$250 ,000 a year. By the time Biden comes into office, that's$400 ,000. And so, yeah, there's also been in this particular moment in 2026, this other smaller but interesting development of the emergence of a kind of anti-Trump, anti-tax resistance movement. or at least some resistance influencers have started arguing that anyone who pays their taxes is funding Donald Trump's wars and ICE detention facilities, and that we all therefore have a civic responsibility to cheat the IRS.

9:35Noel King:I'm just really glad and thankful to not be participating in this sham of an American political system and internal revenue system. Because the government is using my tax dollars to build concentration camps for my neighbors, and so I don't feel like giving them my tax money. Tax strike 2026. Spread the word. All right. So everybody is finding a reason why they should not have to pay taxes. What what happened? Why are we all so irate? You know, I think there are a few things. One. Post-COVID inflation made people really sensitive to their costs. At the same time, also, the post-COVID boom and the inflation led to an increase in property values.

10:20You know, as the price level goes up, the value of homes go up, and that potentially increased people's property tax assessments and increased their nominal property taxes. You know, but also, I guess, as we kind of referenced with this resistance movement to withhold your taxes in order to stick it to Trump, there's this declining trust in our government and especially declining trust in the other party. And so, you know, fundamentally, if you think that one of your nation's major political parties, which tends to be in power, you know, about half the time, is morally abominable and is going to do, you know, absolutely outrageous things with the government funds available to them, then you might not want to give them more of your paycheck.

11:14All right.

11:15Noel King:So historically in our part of the world, tax revolts are something to, on occasion, take seriously. Right. 1773, the Tea Party in Boston and then later on some other tea parties. So so so I'm inclined to take this seriously that everybody's agitated about paying taxes and some states are saying we're going to make you pay less. Where do you think all of this is going? How serious is this? So I think we're on this real collision course where both of the major parties are going to need to confront the fact that they have essentially taken a bunch of positions that do not mathematically work with each other.

11:56That Democrats are really committed to expanding the social safety net dramatically, and yet they have no appetite for broad-based tax increases and in fact are now flirting with large tax cuts. they have this tension between they want to build the welfare state, they're increasingly reliant on upper middle class voters who they don't want to tax. Republicans, they are increasingly dependent on the votes of working class and older voters who value the existing social welfare state, and yet Republicans want to cut taxes more and more and more. And so over the coming decade, we're going to have to decide, These two parties are going to have to decide, you know, what is it that they really value?

12:42How important is it to them to embrace this tax revolt and just keep driving revenue down? Are they willing to pay the costs of that? And we're going to have to find out.

13:03Noel King:Vox's Eric Levitz. when we return the last great American tax revolt.

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17:17Noel King:All right. So we learned in the first half of the show that Americans are in a bit of a mood about taxes. We don't want to pay them. This is not the first time that this has happened. And you, in fact, studied. One of the last times that we went through this, it was in the 1970s. What was going on back then? There was what we call now the property tax revolt, a major sort of grass grassroots movement of protest against local property taxes. It was a nationwide thing. It happened in communities all around the U.S. From the nation's capital, the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research presents today's topic, Taxpayers' Revolt.

18:02But people really remember the events in California because Californians at that time in 1978 amended their constitution to limit the property tax. There are many who believe this is the beginning of something that will go far beyond California. And it is true that 20-odd states already have something in the works more or less similar to Proposition 13. And that tax limitation, which they called Proposition 13, then became national news and had all kinds of impacts in and outside of California.

18:36Noel King:Proposition 13. I lived in Los Angeles for a couple of years. I remember Proposition 13, actually. I remember it being like a big topic of conversation. But not everyone will know of its history. Why does Prop 13 matter? Why is it like such a big deal? Proposition 13 is a big deal for a few reasons. The first is that it really very dramatically changed the state's tax structure. It did a few things all at the same time. First, it said local governments cannot levy any property tax in excess of 1%. So it capped the property tax rate at 1%. The second and more important thing it did is it put an annual cap on the amount that the assessed value of your property for tax purposes could increase from year to year.

19:24So even if your home was, you know, appreciating in value very rapidly, as far as the local tax assessor was concerned, it wasn't actually going up more than 2 % per year in value. And that, among other things, constrained the finances of local governments in California, but it also gave property owners a tax break that grew over time the longer they stayed in their homes. It was the beginning of a real cascade of similar changes to California law, including later initiatives in the 1980s that said that tax break you have on your home because you got in early you can pass that down to your children you can pass that down to your grandchildren that's one reason why Peter Schrag who was the editor of the Sacramento Bee for many years said in the 1990s listen we now have a hereditary aristocracy of property in California the story of Proposition 13 in California matters for at least a couple of reasons one of those reasons is that it's a real cautionary tale that you can really lose something very valuable if you just allow your anger at taxes to take over and you don't think carefully about what to do with that anger.

20:38As I understand it, it's a story of sort of the simplest, worst solution to a real crisis.

20:47Noel King:Where does this thing, Prop 13, where did it come from? First off, property taxes have always been a mess in America. Property taxation is the oldest tax we have in the United States. It predates the Republic. And until the middle decades of the 20th century, the property tax really was still being administered as if we were in the horse and buggy era. So the people who were in charge of figuring out how much your house or your business was worth for the purpose of taxing it, they were political animals. and they didn't tend to have much expertise in actually appraising property. Instead, what they would do is just kind of write down from year to year, oh, we wrote down this number for your home last year, let's write it down again this year.

21:30Let's see here, in 1949 we said it was$10 ,000, it's 1950, so how about$10 ,000? So they were giving away these kinds of informal tax breaks to people in a way that was often also very political. They might trade a low assessment for bribes. They very commonly traded low assessments for votes. Thanks for the tip, sir. And I can count on you in November. And in the 1960s, led by California, many states then began to reform how they administered the property tax. They brought in computers. They professionalized assessment. And suddenly, for the first time, many, many property owners, especially homeowners in the United States, started to get taxed on the values, the actual values of their homes for the first time.