Appearing March 18 on ABC’s The View, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer criticized Americans who think their taxes are too high.  Channeling his inner Barack Obama (“you didn’t build that”), Schumer asserted: “Their attitude is, ‘I made my money all by myself.  How dare your government take my money from me?  I don’t want to pay taxes.  Or ‘I built my company with my bare hands.  How dare your government tell me how I should treat my customers, the land and water that I own, or my employee?’”

Lots of commentators, coming from a political perspective, scored Schumer for promoting high taxes.  A couple, however, dug deeper: They noted that the New York Democrat’s remarks told people exactly what he thought about their money.

Why’s that important?  Because when you start talking “my” money or “your” money or “their” money, you’ve moved out of politics into a more important (though less discussed) field: morality.  What belongs to somebody, how much belongs to him, and who has rights in justice to demand some part of it are all ethical questions that come into play when one’s right to goods is at play. 

Unfortunately, too much of the moral ground on questions of taxation has been ceded to the left.  We’ve let the left collapse the moral question of taxation itself into an ethical question of tax rates: Is X paying his “fair share”?  Implicit in that question is the unspoken belief that “rich guy” X isn’t.

As a moral theologian, I want to challenge that paradigm.

Catholic theology recognizes that government has some claim to taxes because human beings are not isolated individuals who neither have social ties nor derive benefits from living and working together with others in community.  Communal goods — infrastructure, utilities, rule of law — are not “free lunches.”  They are benefits that cost.  It is just for us all to pay for them.

But Catholic theology also insists on another social principle that Schumer et al. often forget: subsidiarity.  Subsidiarity means that responsibility for a given problem should not be entrusted to any higher an authority than necessary.  If a problem can be handled by a family, it should not become a responsibility of government.  If one’s local town can take care of the problem, it shouldn’t be a state matter.  If states can deal with the problem (with responses perhaps tailored to local needs), there’s no justification for its federalization.

So, although society has some claim to compensation (i.e., taxes) for things that benefit the common good, there are two moral tests that need to be assessed: the burden of proof and the proper level of responsibility.

First, in contrast to Schumer, we need to flip the “burden of proof.”  The burden of proof is not that the government asserts a tax claim and the taxpayer yields.  The burden should be that the government proves that it must (not “would like to” or “wants”) to address this issue and is doing so at the most efficient minimum price.

The Supreme Court recognized this in a 2023 case, Tyler v. Hennepin County.  Geraldine Tyler was a senior citizen whose family moved her out of her condominium to an assisted living facility.   The family kept the condo but forgot about property taxes. 

Twenty-three hundred dollars in actual property tax arrears accrued on the property.  The Minnesota county tacked on another $13,000 in interest and penalties.  Eventually, it seized the property and sold it for $40,000.  Tim Walz’s heaven didn’t just then take $15,300 and send the Tylers a check for $24,700.  It kept it all — and went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to defend its right to profit from an old woman’s home.  The Supreme Court swatted it down.  Adapting the biblical injunction, it affirmed that one must render unto Caesar what is due Caesar, and no more than that.

The problem with the Caesar Schumers of this world is that they hold the power to assert unilaterally what is “due” them — and that price is what more and more Americans are pressing back against.  The moral question of taxation needs to start with not “How much can the state take?,” but “Why is the state justified in taking this?”  There’s a right claim at stake here, and “Thou shalt not steal” has no governmental exception.

The second issue, closely allied to the first, is whether the costs these taxes are supposed to pay are happening at the proper level of responsibility.  The erosion of federalism has transferred more and more tasks to Washington, whose remoteness makes oversight harder.  Before we hand out Department of Education grants to local schools, we need to ask: Why is this coming from Washington rather than New Jersey or Texas or Idaho?  Before we send $47,000 to Colombia for a “transgender opera,” we need to ask: why should the government be paying for any opera, foreign or domestic? 

Losing sight of the moral question then turns taxation into a question governed not by principles, but by the give-and-take horse trading of political compromise.  And then, sooner or later, you have a $35-trillion deficit.

It’s time to reclaim the moral high ground on taxation.  John Marshall recognized that over two centuries ago, in his famous line in McCulloch v. Maryland: “The power to tax is the power to destroy.”  In his case, it was a bank.  In ours, it’s a nation and its hardworking taxpayers.

Image: pasja1000 via Pixabay, Pixabay License.