Tax and Spend: The Welfare State, Tax Politics, and the Limits of American Liberalism

Abstract

News flash: American fiscal politics is dysfunctional. What Tax and Spend seeks to explain is why—why Americans want to clear-cut the forest (the government) while thickening the trees (the programs they rely upon). There is no shortage of explanations for the cultural and political shifts underlying the fix that the United States finds itself in as Tea Party movement common sense pits “makers” against “takers.” Historians have contextualized the conservative resurgence that has occurred since the 1970s in such phenomena as the breakdown of trust in government, racial resentments, culture war backlashes, an evangelical surge, growing inequalities of a neoliberal economy, and shrinking visions of who counts as part of a “real” America. But grounding today's toxic budget mess in the New Right, Molly C. Michelmore warns us, will not do. Before the Reagan revolution, liberals had already dug their own fiscal graves. Anyone wanting to grasp today's predicament should consult this incisive, disheartening, vivid, and informed road map to fiscal hell. Invaluable endnotes (30 percent of this compact yet ambitious study) showcase the author's literature command, even as she moves beyond familiar interpretations. Her captivating refrain is that liberal policy makers forged a postwar social compact promising a social safety net, economic growth, and low taxes. The postwar liberal state effectively decoupled the tax obligations of citizenship from the benefits those taxes secured for middle-class and other Americans. Michelmore's implicit counterfactual is that pairing sacrosanct social welfare initiatives such as Social Security or Medicare with higher income taxes would have undercut efforts to slash those taxes to defund government “waste” and handouts to undeserving “others.” I wonder, however, if that pairing would instead only have opened those bulletproof programs to conservative assault.