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The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America
How the antitax fringe went mainstream—and now threatens America’s future
The postwar United States enjoyed large, widely distributed economic rewards—and most Americans accepted that taxes were a reasonable price to pay for living in a society of shared prosperity. Then in 1978 California enacted Proposition 13, a property tax cap that Ronald Reagan hailed as a “second American Revolution,” setting off an antitax, antigovernment wave that has transformed American politics and economic policy. In The Power to Destroy , Michael Graetz tells the story of the antitax movement and how it holds America hostage—undermining the nation’s ability to meet basic needs and fix critical problems.
In 1819, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that the power to tax entails “the power to destroy.” But The Power to Destroy argues that tax opponents now wield this destructive power. Attacking the IRS, protecting tax loopholes, and pushing tax cuts from Reagan to Donald Trump, the antitax movement is threatening the nation’s social safety net, increasing inequality, ballooning the national debt, and sapping America’s financial strength. The book chronicles how the movement originated as a fringe enterprise promoted by zealous outsiders using false economic claims and thinly veiled racist rhetoric, and how—abetted by conservative media and Grover Norquist’s “taxpayer protection pledge"—it evolved into a mainstream political force.
The important story of how the antitax movement came to dominate and distort politics, and how it impedes rational budgeting, equality, and opportunities, The Power to Destroy is essential reading for understanding American life today.
The postwar United States enjoyed large, widely distributed economic rewards—and most Americans accepted that taxes were a reasonable price to pay for living in a society of shared prosperity. Then in 1978 California enacted Proposition 13, a property tax cap that Ronald Reagan hailed as a “second American Revolution,” setting off an antitax, antigovernment wave that has transformed American politics and economic policy. In The Power to Destroy , Michael Graetz tells the story of the antitax movement and how it holds America hostage—undermining the nation’s ability to meet basic needs and fix critical problems.
In 1819, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that the power to tax entails “the power to destroy.” But The Power to Destroy argues that tax opponents now wield this destructive power. Attacking the IRS, protecting tax loopholes, and pushing tax cuts from Reagan to Donald Trump, the antitax movement is threatening the nation’s social safety net, increasing inequality, ballooning the national debt, and sapping America’s financial strength. The book chronicles how the movement originated as a fringe enterprise promoted by zealous outsiders using false economic claims and thinly veiled racist rhetoric, and how—abetted by conservative media and Grover Norquist’s “taxpayer protection pledge"—it evolved into a mainstream political force.
The important story of how the antitax movement came to dominate and distort politics, and how it impedes rational budgeting, equality, and opportunities, The Power to Destroy is essential reading for understanding American life today.
368 pages, Hardcover
Published February 13, 2024
26 people are currently reading
305 people want to read
About the author
Michael J. Graetz
29 books17 followersMichael J. Graetz is Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Columbia Alumni Professor of Tax Law at Columbia University and Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Yale Law School.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
January 10, 2025
As you can tell from the title, Michael J. Graetz's book starts with a definite point of view; supply-side economics and constant tax cuts are not working for America's economy. The title also indicates that this is a history of the American antitax movement, as opposed to building a defense of a thesis. Although the history he presents shows plenty of evidence in that vein, it's not written to convince supply-side true believers. If you're neutral to skeptical on supply-side economics and tax cuts, then this book has a lot to show you. Graetz has spent his entire career dealing with tax policy and politics, so you can't say he doesn't know his subject matter.
After an introductory chapter summing up the type of support the antitax movement needed to broaden their appeal, Graetz's book proceeds to tell how we got here. It started with the inflation problems of the 1970's, which pushed up property taxes while wages stagnated, and the backlash to desegregating public schools, with private segregation academies trying to keep non-profit tax status. Graetz is especially blunt in that chapter. The non-profit status was needed to keep these private, mostly religious, schools accessible to non-wealthy whites so they would continue supporting the closing of public schools to prevent black students from attending.
Graetz shows that supply-siders' predictions of tax cuts paying for themselves and growing our economy didn't pan out. Deficits ballooned, "starving the beast" did not shrink government, the rich invested to increase capital instead of jobs and infrastructure, tax avoidance and evasion rose, and the inequality gap widened. Raising taxes became political suicide, but so did cutting expensive but popular safety net programs. Despite repeated attempts, fiscal conservatives have yet to get rid of or privatize Social Security (which David Stockman, Reagan's budget director, described as "closet socialism").
The main focus of Graetz's book is the history. He explains how inflation played a part in California's Proposition 13, but not the economics that caused the inflation of the 1970's. He gives high-level descriptions of tax shelter schemes that boomed in the 1980's, but no in-depth details on how they work. You will get accounts of the negotiations around various tax bills and the players involved, but not deep analysis of the bills or policy.
You will be shown how time and again, instead of making hard decisions about tax reform and deficits, politicians told us what we wanted to hear, "that reducing taxes is the best policy, regardless of the nation's economic or fiscal condition." Nobody—Congress, presidents, both major political parties, the media, business coalitions, lobbyists, think tanks, American voters—comes out of this account covered in glory. (Although Walter Mondale comes across as naïvely honest.) As in many political science books addressing polarization and culture wars, Newt Gingrich once again comes across as especially blameworthy. Not to mention disingenuous, hypocritical, and willing to wage scorched earth battles in his own backyard if it furthered his ambitions.
I learned lots of things that were new to me:
• Opposition to taxes was one of the few issues that the fractious groups in the Republican coalition could agree on.
• Early supply-side champions were mostly journalists; economists took longer to persuade.
• While President, Reagan quietly signed tax raises five times to the one time he cut them to great fanfare, but still left the country in more debt than all his predecessors combined.
• Repeated pushing for a constitutional balanced budget amendment was political theatre, and not expected to actually happen.
• A 1980's tax shelter allowed investors like Philip Morris and UPS to "own" thirteen ships for the U.S. Navy's Rapid Deployment Force and rent them back to the Navy for an added cost of $300 million to taxpayers.
• According to a 2000 poll, 39% of Americans believed they were either in the top 1% of wealth or would be there "soon," which is partly why they supported repeal of estate taxes.
• The early Tea Party was small, and might have proved insignificant if not for disproportionate media coverage, like "Fox News Corporation Tea Parties" events, and funding from political antitax organisations, like the Koch brothers' FreedomWorks.
• When the IRS received an increase in funding under President Biden to improve service and the timeliness of refunds, Republican legislators and politicians, including Chuck Grassley, claimed it was to create "an IRS super-police force" and "IRS SWAT team" coming with "loaded AK-15s," and "ready to shoot some small-business person in Iowa."
• Despite Mitt Romney's statement of "takers" who will never vote Republican because they expect "makers" taxes as handouts, "nine of the ten states with the highest percentage of people who pay no income taxes are Republican strongholds."
• While Grover Norquist's saying about shrinking government to the size that could be drowned in a bathtub is well known, I was unaware that he considers bipartisanship as "another name for date rape," that he believes there is no point to the American government's existence once Soviet communism fell, and he once compared estate taxes to the Holocaust.
Of the salient points that Graetz makes, one great example that stood out to me is the Laffer curve. Developed by economist Alfred Laffer, one of the early acolates of supply-side, it comes with an apocryphal origin story attached of getting sketched on a napkin in a burst of insight over a restaurant dinner with fellow visionaries. Aside from the two end points—a tax rate of 0% brings in zero revenue and a tax rate of 100% brings in zero revenue—Laffer's curve didn't contain hard data. (The Wikipedia page linked above has a whole section on the difficulties economists had trying to work the numerous variables of a real economy into the curve in order to find the midpoint.) As far as supply-siders were concerned, we were never on the correct side of the curve no matter how far or how often the tax rate was lowered.
As Graetz mentions repeatedly, low taxes and high government expenditures is not a sustainable combination. "It is a movement grounded in fantasies." Unfortunately, he doesn't see an end in sight. Rigid partisan politics, ironically exacerbated by the inequality from decades of tax cuts, makes compromise far harder. Americans' trust in their government and its institutions is lower than when the antitax movement went mainstream. "Everyone seems to believe the taxes necessary to fund government should be paid by someone else" (pg. 264). He's not sure how bad things would have to get to force change, or if change will come at all. Not an uplifting read, but an informative and sobering one.
See also:
Once heavily involved with Reaganomics, Bruce Bartlett wrote The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward after he came to the realization that tax cuts can't be the only tool in the economic toolbox. He was exiled and shunned by the Republican party for saying so. He still defends tax cuts as ending stagflation, but argues they're no silver bullet.
Political scientist Larry Bartels wrote Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, now in its second edition, after a large amount of research. As a Republican, he was disappointed by what he found, but to his credit, followed the data, which showed that American citizens do better economically in the long-term under Democratic economic policies.
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, and Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980, all by Rick Perlstein, document the political history of the United States that led from Goldwater to Reagan.
The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle gives a more comprehensive global history of neoliberalism, along with the New Deal order that it replaced.
After an introductory chapter summing up the type of support the antitax movement needed to broaden their appeal, Graetz's book proceeds to tell how we got here. It started with the inflation problems of the 1970's, which pushed up property taxes while wages stagnated, and the backlash to desegregating public schools, with private segregation academies trying to keep non-profit tax status. Graetz is especially blunt in that chapter. The non-profit status was needed to keep these private, mostly religious, schools accessible to non-wealthy whites so they would continue supporting the closing of public schools to prevent black students from attending.
Graetz shows that supply-siders' predictions of tax cuts paying for themselves and growing our economy didn't pan out. Deficits ballooned, "starving the beast" did not shrink government, the rich invested to increase capital instead of jobs and infrastructure, tax avoidance and evasion rose, and the inequality gap widened. Raising taxes became political suicide, but so did cutting expensive but popular safety net programs. Despite repeated attempts, fiscal conservatives have yet to get rid of or privatize Social Security (which David Stockman, Reagan's budget director, described as "closet socialism").
The main focus of Graetz's book is the history. He explains how inflation played a part in California's Proposition 13, but not the economics that caused the inflation of the 1970's. He gives high-level descriptions of tax shelter schemes that boomed in the 1980's, but no in-depth details on how they work. You will get accounts of the negotiations around various tax bills and the players involved, but not deep analysis of the bills or policy.
You will be shown how time and again, instead of making hard decisions about tax reform and deficits, politicians told us what we wanted to hear, "that reducing taxes is the best policy, regardless of the nation's economic or fiscal condition." Nobody—Congress, presidents, both major political parties, the media, business coalitions, lobbyists, think tanks, American voters—comes out of this account covered in glory. (Although Walter Mondale comes across as naïvely honest.) As in many political science books addressing polarization and culture wars, Newt Gingrich once again comes across as especially blameworthy. Not to mention disingenuous, hypocritical, and willing to wage scorched earth battles in his own backyard if it furthered his ambitions.
I learned lots of things that were new to me:
• Opposition to taxes was one of the few issues that the fractious groups in the Republican coalition could agree on.
• Early supply-side champions were mostly journalists; economists took longer to persuade.
• While President, Reagan quietly signed tax raises five times to the one time he cut them to great fanfare, but still left the country in more debt than all his predecessors combined.
• Repeated pushing for a constitutional balanced budget amendment was political theatre, and not expected to actually happen.
• A 1980's tax shelter allowed investors like Philip Morris and UPS to "own" thirteen ships for the U.S. Navy's Rapid Deployment Force and rent them back to the Navy for an added cost of $300 million to taxpayers.
• According to a 2000 poll, 39% of Americans believed they were either in the top 1% of wealth or would be there "soon," which is partly why they supported repeal of estate taxes.
• The early Tea Party was small, and might have proved insignificant if not for disproportionate media coverage, like "Fox News Corporation Tea Parties" events, and funding from political antitax organisations, like the Koch brothers' FreedomWorks.
• When the IRS received an increase in funding under President Biden to improve service and the timeliness of refunds, Republican legislators and politicians, including Chuck Grassley, claimed it was to create "an IRS super-police force" and "IRS SWAT team" coming with "loaded AK-15s," and "ready to shoot some small-business person in Iowa."
• Despite Mitt Romney's statement of "takers" who will never vote Republican because they expect "makers" taxes as handouts, "nine of the ten states with the highest percentage of people who pay no income taxes are Republican strongholds."
• While Grover Norquist's saying about shrinking government to the size that could be drowned in a bathtub is well known, I was unaware that he considers bipartisanship as "another name for date rape," that he believes there is no point to the American government's existence once Soviet communism fell, and he once compared estate taxes to the Holocaust.
Of the salient points that Graetz makes, one great example that stood out to me is the Laffer curve. Developed by economist Alfred Laffer, one of the early acolates of supply-side, it comes with an apocryphal origin story attached of getting sketched on a napkin in a burst of insight over a restaurant dinner with fellow visionaries. Aside from the two end points—a tax rate of 0% brings in zero revenue and a tax rate of 100% brings in zero revenue—Laffer's curve didn't contain hard data. (The Wikipedia page linked above has a whole section on the difficulties economists had trying to work the numerous variables of a real economy into the curve in order to find the midpoint.) As far as supply-siders were concerned, we were never on the correct side of the curve no matter how far or how often the tax rate was lowered.
As Graetz mentions repeatedly, low taxes and high government expenditures is not a sustainable combination. "It is a movement grounded in fantasies." Unfortunately, he doesn't see an end in sight. Rigid partisan politics, ironically exacerbated by the inequality from decades of tax cuts, makes compromise far harder. Americans' trust in their government and its institutions is lower than when the antitax movement went mainstream. "Everyone seems to believe the taxes necessary to fund government should be paid by someone else" (pg. 264). He's not sure how bad things would have to get to force change, or if change will come at all. Not an uplifting read, but an informative and sobering one.
See also:
Once heavily involved with Reaganomics, Bruce Bartlett wrote The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward after he came to the realization that tax cuts can't be the only tool in the economic toolbox. He was exiled and shunned by the Republican party for saying so. He still defends tax cuts as ending stagflation, but argues they're no silver bullet.
Political scientist Larry Bartels wrote Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, now in its second edition, after a large amount of research. As a Republican, he was disappointed by what he found, but to his credit, followed the data, which showed that American citizens do better economically in the long-term under Democratic economic policies.
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, and Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980, all by Rick Perlstein, document the political history of the United States that led from Goldwater to Reagan.
The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle gives a more comprehensive global history of neoliberalism, along with the New Deal order that it replaced.
January 19, 2025
3.5 stars rounded down
A survey of U.S. political history from the 1970s to today (very timely, in fact, ending in late 2023). If you’re a student of this time period, you will be quite familiar with the sweep of this history. There’s not much new here except for Graetz’s focus on the tax code, and really tax rates, as an organizing principle for conservative politics. You will see that same Lee Atwater Southern Strategy quote that makes its way into every U.S. political history book.
That being said, there are some interesting details and anecdotes. For example, Graetz starts with quite a deep look at California’s Proposition 13 (the 1970s ballot measure that capped property taxes and led to decades of fiscal crisis in the state). I also learned that during the Reagan administration, apparently the U.S. Navy *rented* ships that were technically owned by corporations in order to: 1) give these organizations a tax kickback and 2) avoid some Defense budget appropriations issues. Wild stuff.
Graetz is on more solid analytical ground when he’s describing a narrative arc and reviewing synthesized history during the 1970s-2000s. By around the Obama era, the narrative shifts to a more straight recitation of facts. If you, like me, are already painfully familiar with political journalism during this period, it makes the latter chapters a bit skimmable.
If you’re totally unfamiliar with this history, I think this is an adequate survey. However, I did feel like already being grounded in it helped. The Catch-22 is: if you already know this stuff, there isn’t a whole lot more that Graetz is bringing to the table. But maybe there’s enough to make it a decent read.
A survey of U.S. political history from the 1970s to today (very timely, in fact, ending in late 2023). If you’re a student of this time period, you will be quite familiar with the sweep of this history. There’s not much new here except for Graetz’s focus on the tax code, and really tax rates, as an organizing principle for conservative politics. You will see that same Lee Atwater Southern Strategy quote that makes its way into every U.S. political history book.
That being said, there are some interesting details and anecdotes. For example, Graetz starts with quite a deep look at California’s Proposition 13 (the 1970s ballot measure that capped property taxes and led to decades of fiscal crisis in the state). I also learned that during the Reagan administration, apparently the U.S. Navy *rented* ships that were technically owned by corporations in order to: 1) give these organizations a tax kickback and 2) avoid some Defense budget appropriations issues. Wild stuff.
Graetz is on more solid analytical ground when he’s describing a narrative arc and reviewing synthesized history during the 1970s-2000s. By around the Obama era, the narrative shifts to a more straight recitation of facts. If you, like me, are already painfully familiar with political journalism during this period, it makes the latter chapters a bit skimmable.
If you’re totally unfamiliar with this history, I think this is an adequate survey. However, I did feel like already being grounded in it helped. The Catch-22 is: if you already know this stuff, there isn’t a whole lot more that Graetz is bringing to the table. But maybe there’s enough to make it a decent read.
dnf
May 11, 2025Dnf at 45%. Good info, but I can only read about economics for so long. My cooked brain needs this to be a 2.5 hr long YouTube video by a creator with an anthropomorphic animal profile pic.
August 16, 2024
Graetz argues that the antitax movement, while possibly legitimate in the late 1970s and early 1980s, morphed under Reagan and his supply-side administration into an unsubstantiated instrument of political sclerosis and fiscal irresponsibility. The book is principally a history of the tax code since the 1970s with a focus on the antitax movement. While it is a political hatchet job, the tax-policy progression from California’s Proposition 13 to Biden-era debt-ceiling brinkmanship is illuminating. Graetz’s rebuttal is threefold: first, he rejects the supply-side claim that tax cuts increase (or are the only way to increase) government tax revenues. Second, he rejects the “starve-the-beast” theory first implemented in practice by David Stockman, arguing that for sovereign, creditworthy entities, tax-and-spend will always be replaced by borrow-and-spend in periods of insufficient tax receipts. Third, he rejects the increasingly explicit claim in Republican circles that cutting taxes on the wealthy is the best way to grow the economy. He condemns Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, and Rush Limbaugh for their introduction of tax-cut absolutism into the GOP and the resultant death of bipartisanship and negotiation in Congress, pointing to the Bush tax cuts, the Tea Party, and the TCJA. At the same time, he argues that the consistent popularity of tax cuts has prompted the Democratic Party to restrict its tax proposals to the ultra-wealthy and corporations, which is insufficient. Graetz points to America’s high and progressive pre-Reagan taxes as a wiser and fairer system and warns (although at less length than would be expected) that uncontrolled deficit spending will imperil the American Dream.
April 11, 2024
I want my Congressman and my Senators to read this book so that maybe they could understand my objections to their statements about how the IRS is bad and that taxes are bad. This book explains how this idea of cutting taxes does not make our country grow and that refusing to raise taxes ever is not a viable option. Actually, I want everyone to read this so that they can understand that they are being tricked into believing that the IRS is going to come to their homes with guns drawn to take all their money and that tax cuts for the most wealthy do not help the rest of us.
June 2, 2024
There is a ton of detailed info, so not a fast read. However, enlightening to say the least! Living through the past two plus generations covered, I was reminded of many moments covered, but not aware at the time just how inflexible politicians (most GOP, but not all) had become on the subject. It’s definitely distressing to consider the path we’ve been on and seem unlikely to deviate from in the future.
March 19, 2024
A straightforward review of the last 50 years of US tax policy that shows that cutting taxes neither increases government revenues nor leads to spending cuts but does produce increasing deficits and entrenched divisions between the two parties. A pretty easy read for a book about taxes.
July 21, 2025
An absolute must-read for any American. Very easy to understand political history of the last 50 years. Despite it being mainly about taxes, very interesting and easy to process, even for those of us without fiscal policy knowledge.
August 5, 2024
Very good read.
August 15, 2024
Lots of detail, so it can be a bit of a slog, but understanding how we got where we are regarding taxation is important.
December 31, 2024
Detailed, informative and important historical reminders of taxation in US.
Wonderful resource.
Wonderful resource.
January 7, 2025
I think I'm going to stop writing in-depth reviews for 2025. I liked it, I thought it was fun.
September 22, 2025
Made me want to tear my hair out-great work!
September 30, 2024
This is a very important book, measured, fact filled, very knowledgeable, even handed perspective, about how the anti-tax movement has brought America to the brink. I wish it were more accessible in it's prose and info for the average person. It's brilliantly analytical, and best digested slowly and in bits. Buy this one, it will be a book you go back to often. I didn't finish in time before taking back to the library. This one is purchase worthy, to savor and finish.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews