J.D. Tuccille: Americans are primed for another tax revolt

Tea Party protesters march on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., in 2009. Photo by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

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April is tax month in the United States, when taxpayers must file paperwork and settle accounts with the Internal Revenue Service and its state-level counterparts. This is not, to put it mildly, a popular annual occurrence.

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With the country born in a revolution founded in part on resentment of taxation, Americans remain resistant to taxes that are generally less burdensome than those inflicted on the residents of many other countries. Of course, most Americans also want less government than they have, so it makes sense that they think they’re paying too much for the apparatus of an overly large state.

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According to a recent Gallup poll, “Americans’ belief that they pay too much in taxes remains elevated for the fourth consecutive year, with 59 per cent saying this. Most others, 37 per cent, say their taxes are ‘about right,’ while three per cent think they are too low.”

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Fifty-nine per cent isn’t the height of U.S. anti-tax sentiment. In the 1970s through the ’80s and ’90s, the popular belief that taxes are too high consistently remained above 60 per cent. During that era, even Californians, who’ve remained more tolerant than most Americans of large and intrusive government, pushed back with a tax revolt that culminated in Proposition 13, which wrote a cap on property taxes into the state constitution.

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Then again, post-Proposition 13, California still has the highest combined marginal personal income tax rates of any state in the union. It’s no surprise that Californians chose to push back somewhere given the size of their tax bills. Nevertheless, some policy wonks sniff a bit at public sentiment, pointing out that Americans — even Californians — aren’t taxed as heavily as their peers elsewhere.

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“U.S. taxes are low relative to those in other high-income countries,” points out the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. “In 2021, taxes at all levels of U.S. government represented 27 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), compared with a weighted average of 34 per cent for the other 37 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).”

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France’s Institut Économique Molinari publishes a regular report, “The Tax Burden on Global Workers,” which calculates the day on which the inhabitants of various countries stop working for the state and start working for themselves. The latest edition, from 2024, notes that among the nations examined, “French workers are the last to celebrate their Tax Liberation Day (TLD) again this year, and again on July 17th.” The comparable day for Americans is April 11.

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For Americans’ northern neighbours, Tax Liberation Day comes on May 5. Relative to Canadians, even Californians are rather lightly taxed. The Fraser Institute reports that the state’s combined marginal personal income tax rates are lower than that of all provinces but Alberta and Saskatchewan, and its sales taxes are lower than every province not named Alberta (but the Golden State has the highest capital gains taxes in North America).