Everybody hates taxes. That’s one of the unalienable truths in U.S. politics, and it’s been proven again as the April 15 filing deadline approaches. A drop in tax refunds earlier this year, potentially due to the Republican tax cuts in late 2017, infuriated Americans.*

My husband and I owed money for the first time ever, and are “middle class” according to the tax brackets.



We don’t even make 50k/yr.



No EIC, elimination of other write-offs and deductions, meant the IRS keeps 4K we already paid and we still owe $79. #GOPTaxSCAMStories — VP Wright (@thevpwright) February 9, 2019

While Republicans have long argued that opposition to taxes is baked into the country’s DNA, both parties see tax increases as an existential threat. In 2015, the Republican pollster Frank Luntz expressed the conventional wisdom, telling Bill O’Reilly that taxes were an “emotional” issue for voters: “Nobody wants to see their taxes go up.” For much of the country’s history, a simple calculus has defined political life: Voters reward politicians when taxes go down and punish them when they go up.



Democrats, long tarred as the party of high taxes, face a growing problem as they propose ambitious and expensive programs like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. Fox News and other right-wing outlets have latched on to studies estimating that Medicare for All would cost $32 trillion over ten years and that the Green New Deal would cost $93 trillion. On Tuesday, more than 100 Democrats rolled-out the most ambitious single-payer health care bill yet, a sweeping plan that would enroll everyone in a government-funded program in only two years. But one detail, caught by a number of outlets, was missing: How much it would cost.



It’s easy to see why Democrats are under-emphasizing the cost of these plans. They want to focus on the benefits, not the drawbacks. And understating costs—including potential tax increases—could lead to political disaster, as it famously did for George H. W. Bush after he broke his “read my lips” pledge not to raise taxes. Putting a multi-trillion price tag on any pitch to voters is similarly problematic and could ultimately doom these efforts before they get off the ground.

But there is growing evidence that Democrats shouldn’t be so tepid about tax increases or other means of raising revenue for ambitious legislation. Polling has shown that raising taxes on the wealthy is popular with a majority of voters. Given the damage the Republican Party has caused with pass two deficit-busting tax cuts for the wealthy over the past two decades, Democrats can argue that they’re the party of fiscal seriousness not in spite of any plan to soak the rich, but because of it.

