In My Tax Dollars, Ruth Braunstein maps the contested moral landscape in which Americans experience and make sense of the tax system. Braunstein tells the stories of Americans who view taxpaying as more than a mundane chore: antigovernment tax defiers who challenge the legitimacy of the tax system, antiwar activists who resist the use of their taxes to fund war, antiabortion activists against “taxpayer funded abortions,” and a diverse group of people who promote taxpaying as a moral good.
Though taxpaying is often portrayed as dull and technical, exposure to collective rituals, civic education, propaganda, and protest transforms the practice for many Americans into either a sacred rite of citizenship or a profane threat to what they hold dear. These sacred and profane meanings can apply to the act of taxpaying itself or to the specific uses of tax dollars. Despite intense disagreement about these meanings, politically diverse Americans engaged in both taxpaying and tax resistance valorize the individual taxpayer and “my tax dollars.”
Braunstein explores the profound implications of this meaning making for tax consent, the legitimacy of the tax system, and citizens’ broader understandings of their political relationships. Going beyond the usual focus on tax policy, Braunstein’s innovative view of taxation through the lens of cultural sociology shows how citizens in value-diverse societies coalesce around shared visions of the sacred and fears of the profane.
Ruth Braunstein is associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut and the author of Prophets and Patriots: Faith in Democracy Across the Political Divide.
“In this wonderful new book, Ruth Braunstein reminds us that budgets are, inherently, moral documents. This book shows how the seemingly banal issue of taxes is actually vital to the articulation of the priorities and values of our society. At a time when many are seeking to cut taxes, regulations, and societal investments, Braunstein shows us why we must reconsider this from a moral and ethical perspective.”—Rev. Jim Wallis, Georgetown University
“With stunning analytic insight and gripping evidence, Ruth Braunstein transforms our understandings of the US tax system. My Tax Dollars turns seemingly dull financial ledgers into compelling cultural and social documents. A major contribution to economic and cultural sociology, the book will fascinate readers beyond the academy.”—Viviana A. Zelizer, author of Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy
“My Tax Dollars hits the intellectual jackpot. Alongside colorful portraits of tax propagandists, enthusiasts, resisters, and the ordinary Americans who dutifully, if grudgingly, file returns every April, Ruth Braunstein shows that our views of taxes are really about what we believe we owe each other as citizens. The surprise is not that in a fractured political landscape, those beliefs conflict. The surprise is that all parties to the debate, progressives as much as conservatives, venerate the individual ‘taxpayer,’ who contributes only to get something back—a decidedly contractual idiom that forecloses a more solidary understanding of citizenship. A stunningly original book.”—Francesca Polletta, author of Inventing the Ties that Bind: Imagined Relationships in Moral and Political Life
“The book is a masterclass on weaving together different kinds of sources, from Supreme Court decisions to ethnography to fiction books to Johnny Cash lyrics. Bringing together an extraordinary range of evidence, Braunstein examines how and why taxation is viewed as sacred, profane, or mundane.”—Vanessa Williamson, Brookings Institution
“This book is at once a sophisticated theoretical work, a really novel empirical treatment about a very controversial social fact, and remarkably well written. I am confident it will become a standard text in economic and cultural sociology.”—Jeffrey Alexander, Yale University
