Earlier this month, the IRS finished collecting 2025 taxes, taking in an estimated $5.2 trillion from businesses and households. That’s a lot of cash.But Congress is spending $7 trillion a year, pumping out as much fiscal stimulus now as it did during the Great Recession. All of those excess dollars are spurring retailers to raise prices and the Federal Reserve to slow down interest-rate cuts. Were the economy to tank—because of, say, a war with Iran—we could end up with a toxic combination of widespread joblessness and rampant inflation. Congress is creating long-term risks too. In the coming years, a smaller share of Americans will work and a larger share will require Social Security payments, Medicare, disability-insurance coverage, and long-term care. More mandatory spending plus less revenue plus soaring interest costs on a hefty preexisting debt load add up to a big problem.Instead of doing something about it, Washington is egging on a nationwide tax revolt. Politicians from both parties are slashing rates and spinning loopholes. They’re telling workers that they shouldn’t have to pay for social services, and that even prosperous Americans are overtaxed. In doing so, they are imperiling the country’s financial security and making it harder for future politicians to pass transformative initiatives. Uncle Sam is going to need to raise some money. And that’s going to be hard to do if Americans see their tax returns not as a fair contribution to the greater good but as a punishment or an injustice.Over the past decade, the share of Americans who believe that their income-tax bill is unfair has climbed by 14 percentage points. A majority of Americans, in both parties and at all income levels, say that they are kicking in too much. The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, which teaches people how to conscientiously object to income levies, reports surging interest in its training sessions. Grassroots groups around the country are fighting to “ax the tax.” Most people want rates to go up—just not on them.No wonder. For 50 years, Republicans have made taxes out to be the enemy of the government and the governed alike, passing cuts that have increased inequality and spilled red ink. Ronald Reagan argued that “taxes should hurt” as he dropped the top marginal rate from 70 percent to 28 percent. (Shouldn’t hurt that much, I guess!) George W. Bush provided “relief” to families, while phasing out levies on multimillion-dollar estates and lowering charges on capital gains. Over the past year and a half, Donald Trump has foghorned about what he has done for waiters and whispered about what he has done for real-estate developers. “Every single American at every income level has more money in their pockets,” he told supporters in Las Vegas earlier this month. Technically true—the worst kind of true. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut the tax liability of 85 percent of households, though 60 percent of the cuts went to the wealthy.Washington has applied lighter taxes to investment profits than to salaries and wages for nearly as long as it has been in the business of taxing income at all. Yet under Trump, something has changed. Income levies have become not just uneven but irregular, contingent. The “big beautiful bill” created special provisions for tips, overtime, and retirement benefits, as well as profits taken by owner-operators. Viewed one way, Trump helped blue-collar workers and job-creating entrepreneurs. Viewed another, he created some nice tax-avoidance options for his base, leaving the salary-earning professional-managerial class as the last finger in the national-revenue dam. At his State of the Union address this year, Trump even proposed using tariffs to “substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love.” (Trump continues to insist that foreign exporters pay tariffs. Domestic importers do, passing the costs onto consumers. Thus, Trump’s tariffs constituted the biggest tax hike since 1993.)Along with depressing revenue and complicating the code, Trump is making it harder for the IRS to do its job. He has called its civil servants vindictive, factional, and even anti-Christian. He has fired 25,000 of them, slashing the agency’s budget by nearly 10 percent. The campaign feels personal. In 2022, two of Trump’s businesses were found guilty on four counts of felony tax fraud. Trump is suing the IRS for $10 billion for failing to prevent the leak of some of his tax records. (Were he to win, the payout would cost every American taxpayer $62.) He refuses to release his returns on his own, breaking with half a century of presidential tradition.The IRS’s reputation as a competent, professional agency is under assault. And the notion that the tax code should be simpler and fairer has become a quaint relic of a less polarized time—like proposing that the country bring back voice votes at town halls. Or restore the 55-mile-an-hour speed limit. (Honestly, not a bad idea.) Or tie scolds to the ducking stool again. (When you think about it …) Nobody on the Hill talks about broadening the base and lowering rates anymore. Republicans are all in on giving away goodies to their co-partisans and fermenting a code that looks like Swiss cheese. Democrats are too.To close the deficit, Bill Clinton raised income taxes on filers making more than $250,000 a year in today’s dollars. To pay for the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama raised income taxes on individuals making more than $284,000 a year in today’s dollars. In 2019, Joe Biden vowed never to raise taxes on people earning less than $400,000 a year—a colossal sum, even in Greenwich, Connecticut, or Cupertino, California. To Democratic politicians, apparently, families in the 97th income percentile are middle-class.Perhaps Democrats have exempted high earners from tax hikes to account for the cost-of-living crisis. Perhaps they are trying to address the fractal nature of American inequality, or trying to keep the tax code progressive, even if they cannot keep its revenue stream sufficient. Perhaps, like Trump, they are just pandering to their base. “Democrats used to be the party of the struggling, working class, and downtrodden,” Jessica Riedl of the Tax Policy Center told me. Now they are the party of the “upwardly mobile professional class in major cities—doctors, lawyers, financial advisers, who live in Silicon Valley and Hollywood and New York—and don’t want the Democrats raising their taxes.”Some prominent Democrats are even pushing for tax cuts, beyond the ones the Republicans just made. Senator Chris Van Hollen wants to take a family’s cost of living into account on the 1040 form. Senator Cory Booker wishes to expand credits for kids and low-wage workers. Both want to exempt millions of working-class families from income taxes entirely.While tinkering with marginal rates, Democrats have threaded deductions, credits, and exemptions into the tax code, engaging in “submerged” policy making, as Cornell’s Suzanne Mettler describes it. Tax expenditures are easier for Congress to pass than spending programs, and they’re easier to target at low-income households. Still, Americans don’t really understand these policies. Two in three claimants of the home-mortgage-interest deduction say it doesn’t do much for them. (The deduction can reduce a family’s tax bill by as much as $15,000 a year.) Two in three people with a 529 college savings plan believe that they have never used a government program. The more tax breaks a person receives, the less likely they are to report that Uncle Sam has improved their quality of life, Mettler has found. Yet such initiatives cost the government hundreds of billions of dollars.[Read: We shouldn’t need accountants]The fiercest tax revolts are brewing at the local level. Governor Kathy Hochul of New York has cut state income taxes for joint filers earning up to $323,000 a year, permitted towns and cities to exempt seniors from property taxes, and pushed for abolishing taxes on tips. “If you’re working long shifts, nights, or weekends, those tips should help you pay the bills, not get taxed away,” she said, echoing Bush in promising her constituents “relief.” Politicians in North Dakota, Indiana, Texas, and Montana have slashed property taxes; politicians in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kansas are trying to do so. The front-runner in the Georgia governor’s race wants to eliminate income taxes for public-school educators.The few tax hikes on the table tend to be hyper-focused on the hyper-rich. California is contemplating a one-time, 5 percent levy on the state’s billionaires—200 or so people in a population of 40 million. Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani want taxes on pieds-à-terre worth more than $5 million. The president does not like the proposal: “Mayor Mamdani is DESTROYING New York!” he posted on Truth Social. “The TAX, TAX, TAX Policies are SO WRONG.” (Trump’s Central Park triplex reportedly sports views of all five boroughs, a diamond-encrusted front door, a marble sculpture of Eros, a czarist malachite table, and a ceiling mural of Apollo astride a chariot.)The proposals have some legitimate rationale. Wages for hourly employees have crawled, while the paychecks of investors and executives have soared. At the same time, the wealth of investors and executives has skyrocketed, with the taxman scarcely tapping these fortunes at all. As the law professor Ray Madoff has observed, Amazon has paid Jeff Bezos a salary of roughly $82,000 a year since the late 1990s, “low enough to make him eligible to claim the child tax credit (which he did!).” From 2014 to 2018, his net worth climbed by $99 billion, just 0.98 percent of which went to public coffers, whereas many middle-class families fork over 25 percent of their earnings. Plus, again, the cost of living has become brutally high. Even households making six figures are struggling to afford child care, rent, groceries, health insurance, summer camp, and student-loan debt.Yet tax cuts aren’t a great way to handle high prices. They’re inflationary: They cause high prices. And a lot of these supposedly progressive policies would aid the prosperous, as well as the middle class and working class. Getting rid of property taxes in particular feels like a sop for the well-heeled. Assessments have gone up because home values have gone up. People might not like it, but it is not unfair.It is unfair, however, to give tax write-offs to specific kinds of people making specific kinds of money, even if the policies sound nice in a stump speech. Why should teachers be exempt from income taxes, but not firefighters, sanitation workers, NICU nurses, aides in memory-care units, or paramedics? Why should California’s billionaires pay a wealth tax, but not its near-billionaires? Why should a 66-year-old homeowner get a write-off, but not a 64-year-old homeowner? Why should waiters and security guards get “relief,” but not line cooks or roofers? Why are we calling tax provisions “relief” at all? And why are we casting loopholes for labor instead of cutting them for capital?For Democrats, today’s anti-tax ideology will limit the scope of the possible. Say that a presidential candidate wants to create universal prekindergarten, implement a comprehensive parental-leave policy, lower the Medicare-eligibility age, and invest in clean energy and cancer research. How would they sell the necessary tax hikes? They could raise rates on businesses and millionaires, but it wouldn’t be nearly enough. Liberal European countries fund their welfare programs with broad-based taxes on workers and consumers, not just confiscatory taxes on oligarchs. Nothing suggests that Democrats have the stomach for it. “For all of their talk about taxing the rich, Democrats have not significantly raised upper-income taxes since 1993,” Riedl, from the Tax Policy Center, said. “Why do we assume this massive utopia of huge tax-the-rich revenue is just around the corner?”For Republicans, anti-tax ideology is endangering their political fortunes right now. To pay for his tax cuts for the rich, Trump axed Medicaid and SNAP benefits for the poor. People don’t tend to notice when their tax liability goes down. They really, really notice when they can’t put food on the table or go to the ER for an infection. And in time, anti-tax ideology might threaten the country’s solvency and end up necessitating austerity budgets. Washington has run large deficits without spooking the bond market for years. But what if yields surge and inflation spikes when millions more Americans are retired and millions fewer are working?Average citizens aren’t hearing these arguments. Politicians have spent years telling people making $312,000 a year that they are middle-class, and offering credits, exemptions, loopholes, rate reductions, and deductions to anyone who might cast a ballot for them or cut them a check. They have spent decades making the tax code impossible to understand and the filing process incomprehensible. Nobody needs to enjoy paying their taxes. But the amount they pay has to be reasonable. And they do need to pay up.