Are Taxes Are for Suckers?
Both Parties Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cut
The Congressional Budget Office had projected a deficit of $1.9 trillion for fiscal year 2026. The federal government was spending roughly a third more than it collected in revenue. Then, on February 20, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the president to impose tariffs, striking down the sweeping trade levies that had been a centerpiece of administration trade policy. The Tax Foundation estimated that the IEEPA tariffs, had they survived, would have raised $1.4 trillion over the coming decade. They did not survive.
One might expect, given the circumstances, that political leaders would pause before promising to return still more revenue. One would be wrong. At the state level, at least five states (Texas, Florida, Wyoming, Indiana, and North Dakota) were actively considering full or near-total abolition of the property tax. In California, Katie Porter, the progressive gubernatorial frontrunner, was campaigning on eliminating state income tax for anyone earning under $100,000. At the federal level, two Democratic senators, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, were rolling out major tax-cut proposals at the exact same moment. Booker’s “Keep Your Pay Act,” which would eliminate federal income taxes on the first $75,000 of household income, carries a price tag of $5.3 trillion over a decade, according to the Yale Budget Lab. Van Hollen’s “Working Americans’ Tax Cut Act” would exempt income below $46,000 from federal taxes entirely. Both parties looked at a $1.9 trillion deficit with its largest revenue tool just struck down by the courts, and decided the move was to promise more money back.
Eight days after the tariff ruling, the United States and Israel launched joint military strikes against Iran. Iran retaliated. Within days, the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage through which roughly 20 percent of global crude oil flows, was effectively closed to commercial shipping. Brent crude, trading around $71 per barrel the day before the strikes, surged past $94 within ten days, briefly touched $120, and settled above $100, where it remains. The IEA authorized the largest release of emergency oil stockpiles in fifty years. It was not enough. The fiscal floor was already cracking, and the commodity shock landed on it with both feet.
We want to be clear about the argument we are making. This is not a story about well-meaning politicians who couldn’t resist the easy play, the familiar framing of “short-term electoral math versus long-term fiscal solvency.” That framing is too generous. What we are watching, at both the state and federal level, is something more specific and more damaging: a politics of managed decay in which public services are defunded not by accident but by design, the resulting dysfunction is cited as proof that government doesn’t work, the revenue base is then cut further in response to that manufactured proof, and the savings are directed (through targeted tax exemptions, development subsidies, and contract arrangements) toward a specific political constituency.
Two floors, one country
The first floor is the property tax. It funds 90 percent of school budgets, provides 70 percent of local government revenue, and accounts for 25 percent of all aggregate state and local tax revenue. The Pew Charitable Trusts confirmsthat statewide property tax cuts already enacted in 2025 are straining local budgets in Indiana, Ohio, and Wyoming. For most local governments, the property tax is not one revenue source among many. It is the revenue source, the one that funds fire departments, public libraries, road maintenance, and, above all, schools.
The reason the property tax became that floor is not tradition or inertia. It is because the property tax is the most recession-resistant major revenue source in the American fiscal system, and we know this because it was tested. During the Great Recession, income tax collections collapsed by 17 percent and sales tax revenue fell 7 percent. Property tax receipts grew 5 percent in both 2008 and 2009. A Federal Reserve Board analysis concluded that property tax was “the sole source of strength in state and local tax revenue” during those years, and that without it, the overall decline in tax revenue would have been 30 percent worse. The sales tax, which is what Texas, Florida, and Wyoming now propose as a replacement, is the revenue source that cratered.
Texas knows this firsthand. The state’s housing market barely dipped during the crash: prices flattened for three years rather than contracting 21 percent like the national average, and Texas was the fastest state to recover to pre-recession price levels. The property tax base held. Meanwhile, Texas state tax revenue, which depends heavily on sales taxes, fell 17.5 percent once the broader recession hit. The floor that Governor Abbott now wants to demolish is the same floor that kept Texas school districts solvent in 2009.
The second floor is federal fiscal capacity, the ability of the national government to backstop states when revenues collapse. Historically, when recessions hit, federal transfers have filled part of the gap: stimulus payments, emergency education funding, Medicaid expansion, disaster relief. That backstop assumed a federal government with room to maneuver. The CBO’s projections show a government that has been systematically consuming that room for decades, with debt now on track to reach 120 percent of GDP by 2036.
Both floors are being dismantled at the same time, by different actors, for the same reason. And the Iran shock is the stress test that arrived before either demolition was complete.
The macroeconomic backdrop makes this worse. Revised Bureau of Labor Statistics data released in February 2026 showed that the economy added just 181,000 jobs in all of 2025, the weakest annual total outside of a recession since 2003, averaging a mere 15,000 jobs per month. The unemployment rate stands at 4.3 percent. Every significant oil-price shock in the modern era (the 1973 Arab embargo, the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the 2008 commodity spike) preceded or coincided with recession. Oxford Economics has modeled a scenario in which oil averages $140 per barrel for two months and concluded it would push the eurozone, the United Kingdom, and Japan into contraction, with an economic standstill in the United States. Goldman Sachs raised its recession probability to 25 percent even under their more moderate price assumptions.
Beyond oil, the commodity cascade is broad. The Strait of Hormuz carries crude but also liquefied natural gas, petrochemical feedstocks, and sulfur. Gulf countries supply a vast share of global sulfur, an input without which fertilizers cannot be made. Qatar’s LNG production was halted after Iranian drone strikes. Aluminum shipments from the UAE are disrupted. As Moody’s supply chain analysts have noted, inventories for many of these commodities cover only a few weeks, meaning shortages can materialize rapidly.
The states cut their floors assuming the federal ceiling would hold. The federal ceiling was already gone.
What’s being cut
We should begin by acknowledging that the populist case for property tax relief is rooted in a grievance (genuine or not depends on your point of view). Property values have risen almost 27 percent faster than inflation since 2020. In just two years, the average U.S. home sales price soared from $371,100 to $525,100, figures documented by the Tax Foundation’s review of property tax reform efforts across states. Americans feel squeezed, and some are squeezed (mostly younger homeowners). Gallup’s most recent polling finds that 50 percent of Americans now say their taxes are unfair, up from 39 percent in 2020, essentially matching the all-time low in perceived tax fairness first recorded in 1999.
Fair enough. But the proposed solutions are a windfall for the wrong people, and that is not an accident.
The homeowners who benefit most from property tax elimination are overwhelmingly Baby Boomers who already own high-value, fully paid-off properties. They are the largest property-owning cohort, the highest-turnout voting bloc, and (this is the point) many have already put their children through the public schools now being defunded. The political incentive is a near-perfect alignment: give the most powerful voting bloc the cut that benefits them most, let the next generation absorb the service loss, and let the local school board take the blame.
People would argue that this is just “populist” nonsense, I would like to point out that “centrists” have a rich history in doing the same thing. In Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago, the mayor closed 50 public schools, the largest single mass closure in American history, overwhelmingly in Black and Latino neighborhoods, citing budget necessity. Simultaneously, he proposed a $55 million TIF subsidy for a DePaul University basketball arena. The Tax Increment Financing program, which diverted roughly one-third of Chicago property taxes (a half-billion dollars annually) into what critics called a mayoral slush fund for favored developers, operated throughout.
Proceeds from the sold school buildings were used to build and expand schools that disproportionately served white, middle-class families in a district that was over 80 percent Black, Latino, and low-income. The pattern is: defund the services that poor (often times denser) communities use, redirect the savings to the constituency (in less dense and more costly areas) that votes, and frame the entire operation as “tough fiscal choices.”
Emanuel is not an outlier. He is the template. The same TIF abuse that funded his arena subsidies operates in cities across the country, and the single largest category of beneficiary is professional sports. Between 1970 and 2020, state and local governments spent $33 billion building stadiums and arenas, with taxpayers covering a median of 73 percent of construction costs. A 2017 survey found that 83 percent of economists said the public cost outweighs the economic benefit. The money comes from the same sources being starved: in Detroit, the Michigan legislature voted in 2012 to redirect school property taxes to subsidize Little Caesars Arena, a new home for the Red Wings and Pistons, while the city was in the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. By 2051, $726 million in school property tax revenue will have been diverted to the project. The promised “District Detroit” development around the arena never materialized; HBO found nothing but parking lots and empty promises. Over the past decade, more than $347 million intended for Detroit’s public schools was diverted to development projects or wiped out by tax abatements. This is the thing that makes the “cut spending” crowd so toxic in practice: they are not cutting spending. They are moving it from schools to stadiums, from libraries to developer subsidies, from the public ledger to the private one, and calling the result fiscal discipline.
The state-level property tax abolition movement is this same pattern at scale. The proposed cuts are not marginal adjustments. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has made elimination of the school district property tax a centerpiece of his 2026 reelection campaign. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has called for a constitutional amendment to eliminate homestead property taxes entirely, threatening a special legislative session if lawmakers do not put it before voters. Separate analyses by the Tax Foundation and the Florida Policy Institute concluded that replacing the lost revenue would require at least doubling the state’s general sales tax rate, which is to say, replacing an extremely stable tax (property taxes are stable even during recessions) with a deeply volatile one (sales tax revenues fall hardest during recessions). In Wyoming, the Legislative Service Office projects that eliminating property taxes would cost local governments and schools $644 million annually, while the proposed 2-percentage-point sales tax increase intended to fill the gap would raise only about $475 million, leaving a structural hole of roughly $169 million per year.
Several states that enacted property tax cuts in 2025 explicitly left it to local governments to make up the lost revenue, a fiscal shell game in which the popular announcement happens at the statehouse and the painful cuts happen at the school board. Indiana’s 2025 legislation gave homeowners $1.2 billion in tax relief over three years; the Pew Charitable Trusts reports that many localities now face budget shortfalls and are enacting cuts in response. In Ohio, new property tax restrictions, enacted over the governor’s veto, have school officials warning of teacher layoffs and cash-flow crises. The popular announcement happens in the capital. The pain happens in the neighborhood. That is the design.
What breaks
The damage from these cuts is not hypothetical. Things are breaking. In Wyoming, the revenue gap simply cannot be filled by the replacement mechanism on offer. The Association of Educational Service Agencies reports that property tax changes in Ohio have created complex new limits on local tax growth and added state-level veto points over school levies, squeezing districts’ revenue capacity from multiple directions at once. Across the country, ESAs warn that the most consequential changes are not the headline-grabbing elimination plans but the quieter caps, exemptions, and procedural barriers that steadily restrict how much local revenue can grow over time.
The structural problem deserves emphasis. Temporary surpluses, generated by the post-pandemic recovery and elevated asset prices, were used to fund permanent tax cuts. With budgets now strained, a commodity shock arriving, recession signals flashing, and a $1.9 trillion federal deficit growing, policymakers have no capacity to backfill the revenue they gave away. The fiscal cushion needed to absorb a crisis was spent performing fiscal-responsibility theater during the good years.
When state revenues slow (and they always eventually slow) school districts will be structurally exposed with no cushion and no backstop. That is not a prediction. It is arithmetic.
The Democratic turn
The Republican property tax playbook is by now familiar: cut visible taxes, leave invisible service cuts for local governments to absorb and take the blame for. The Democratic federal version is newer, and more alarming for what it signals about the state of the party’s political imagination.
Spooked by the cultural resonance of Donald Trump’s “no tax on tips” message, which, as Senator Van Hollen himself acknowledged, was the best-testing line in Trump’s State of the Union address, Democratic presidential hopefuls responded not with a defense of public investment but with their own tax-cut counterprogramming. Booker’s “Keep Your Pay Act” would make the first $75,000 of household income tax-free, reduce the median family’s federal income tax by an estimated 85 percent, and cost $5.3 trillion over a decade. Van Hollen’s “Working Americans’ Tax Cut Act” would eliminate federal income taxes for anyone earning below $46,000, or below $92,000 for married couples, paid for by a tiered surtax on income above $1 million. Both are branded as working-class relief.
The tells are everywhere. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy notes that the poorest 20 percent of households would receive nothing from Van Hollen’s plan; their federal tax liability is already zero. Booker’s working-class branding does not hold up under scrutiny either: a married couple earning a combined $300,000 with no children would save approximately $10,000 a year under his proposal, according to the tax calculator on his own website. And the cruelest irony: Booker himself was part of the coalition that championed the expanded Child Tax Credit in 2021, which cut child poverty in half. When Congress let it expire, 3.7 million more children fell below the poverty line in a single month. Booker’s own statement at the time: “We should have never allowed this critical program to lapse.” Now he is proposing a tax cut that costs fifty times as much per year and gives nothing to the families the CTC was reaching.
The deeper tell, though, is that neither proposal is designed to pass. When a prospective presidential candidate introduces a $5.3 trillion proposal in a Congress controlled by the opposing party, the goal is to advance a narrative, not enact a law. Booker is up for reelection in 2026 and widely rumored to be considering a 2028 presidential run. Van Hollen’s bill has nearly twenty Democratic co-sponsors, including Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, another frequently mentioned presidential prospect. As CBS News noted, neither bill is likely to move forward with Republicans in control of both chambers. These are positioning documents dressed as fiscal policy.
The same performative logic governs Republican property tax cuts at the state level: announce the relief now, let the next school board deal with the funding gap. Both parties have converged on the same short-term move at the same moment. This Emanuelist formula (announce the benefit at the top, absorb the pain at the middle and the bottom via cut programs and services, let someone else take the blame) has become genuinely bipartisan.
A $1.9 trillion deficit before the first missile
The federal government’s fiscal position was dire before the crisis. CBO projected outlays of $7.4 trillion and revenues of $5.6 trillion for FY2026, a gap of $1.9 trillion, or roughly 6 percent of GDP. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget reports that the government had already borrowed $1 trillion in the first five months of the fiscal year. Interest payments on the national debt are on track to exceed $1 trillion annually and will surpass $2 trillion by 2036.
Then two shocks hit in rapid succession. The Supreme Court’s tariff ruling on February 20 eliminated a revenue stream that was generating well over $100 billion per year; the government had collected at least $133.5 billion in IEEPA tariff payments by mid-December 2025 alone, with total collections likely exceeding $160 billion by the time of the ruling. Eight days later, the Iran strikes triggered a commodity shock whose fiscal costs (reduced economic activity, increased military expenditures, potential recession) have not yet been fully priced into any budget model.
This matters because states have historically relied on federal capacity as an implicit safety net. When state revenues collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic, federal transfers filled a substantial share of the gap. That backstop assumed a federal government with some fiscal room to maneuver. Both parties are now competing to consume what remains of that room faster. The states cut their floors assuming the federal ceiling would hold. We keep returning to this formulation because it is the central fact of the current moment.
The doom loop, and the leaders who broke it
The anti-tax sentiment that dominates American politics was not born from selfishness or irrationality. Gallup first asked about federal income tax fairness during World War II, when 85 to 90 percent of Americans said what they paid was fair. That civic compact held for decades. Then the 1979 oil crisis triggered a decade of stagflation, rewired American politics permanently, and produced a legitimate grievance: government had stopped delivering. Reaganism and the anti-tax coalition it birthed were (in part) responses to a real experience of government failure.
This point is important and often lost in progressive commentary. To dismiss all anti-tax sentiment as mere greed or false consciousness is to misunderstand the problem and, worse, to guarantee that it persists.
But here is the trap, and it is one that both parties have fallen into: instead of rebuilding the case for public investment, instead of demonstrating that government can deliver, they competed to promise more money back. Each cycle of cuts erodes the services that justify the taxes, which erodes public trust further, which makes the next round of cuts more politically viable. It is a doom loop, and it has now run for nearly half a century.
The demographic engine keeps it spinning. Baby Boomers, the cohort most likely to say taxes are used inefficiently (and often were the ones who cut the most efficient parts of the government), with the highest voter turnout, the most to gain from property tax cuts, and many already through the schools now being defunded, are the perfect constituency for a political class that has adopted Emanuelism as its default mode. The short-termism ratchet locks it in: cyclical surpluses converted to permanent tax cuts by politicians who will be gone before the bill comes due. Put together, these forces form a self-reinforcing system that neither party has any incentive to disrupt.
Conservatives reading this should not assume the argument is only about what tax cuts do to services. The argument is also about what tax cuts do to the economy when the theory behind them is wrong. In 2012, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback slashed the top income tax rate by nearly a third and eliminated taxes on pass-through business income entirely, calling it “a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy” and “a real live experiment” in supply-side economics. The experiment ran for five years. It failed on its own terms. Kansas grew roughly 7.8 percent less than comparable states over the period, employment growth lagged, the state’s bond rating was downgraded three times, and revenue fell so far short that lawmakers gutted funding for roads, bridges, and schools. Businesses did not flood into the state; what flooded in were tax shelters, as earners restructured their income to exploit the pass-through loophole. In 2017, the Republican legislature overrode Brownback’s veto and repealed the cuts, raising taxes by $1.2 billion over two years. The lesson is not that tax cuts are always bad. The lesson is that a tax cut is a financial instrument, not an operating strategy. Cutting revenue does not make government more efficient, just as cutting a hospital’s budget does not make its doctors more skilled. If the goal is a government that performs better for less, the work is operational: procurement, staffing, systems, measurement. That is harder than signing a tax cut and far less photogenic. But it is the only version that actually works, and both La Guardia and Warren proved it.
But it has been disrupted before, and the two clearest examples are both Republicans.
La Guardia: how to build a government that earns trust
When Fiorello La Guardia took office as mayor of New York in January 1934, the city had recently been compelled to accept a bankers’ bailout to avoid default. Unemployment was roughly 25 percent. Tent cities sprawled through Central Park and Red Hook. The Tammany Hall machine that preceded him had converted the city’s administrative apparatus into a patronage operation: unclassified civil service positions, jobs handed out as political favors, numbered approximately 15,000.
La Guardia’s approach was the precise inverse of Emanuelism. He did not cut services to justify further cuts. He raised revenue and restructured government to deliver more, visibly better. In 1934, he secured enabling legislation from Albany to balance the city budget through structural reorganization and special taxes. As a congressman, when Herbert Hoover proposed a national sales tax, La Guardia’s response was “I am simply going to say soak the rich.” He preferred luxury goods taxes and graduated income taxes. As mayor, he was more pragmatic. He cut his own salary in half, slashed payrolls, levied business taxes, and, overcoming his personal opposition, passed a 2 percent city sales tax to fund relief. He raised revenue broadly, not selectively, and he did not pretend the city could balance its books by taxing only the wealthy. But his instinct about where the floor belonged was right: when the choice is between a graduated tax and a flat consumption tax, the consumption tax hits working families hardest. That is exactly the swap that Texas, Florida, and Wyoming are now proposing.
Then he did what no Emanuelist would ever do: he professionalized the government, not make some token noises. This is the distinction that the modern tax-cut debate almost entirely ignores. La Guardia did not improve New York by adjusting the revenue line on a spreadsheet. He improved it by changing how the organization ran. The number of unclassified civil service positions fell from 15,000 to 1,500 between 1933 and 1940. Civil service applications rose from 6,327 to over 250,000 by 1939. He replaced political loyalty with competence. The result was a city government that could actually execute, and then he gave it things to execute. His partnership with Roosevelt channeled enormous New Deal funding into parks, playgrounds, swimming pools, schools, bridges, highways, an airport, and 13 public housing projects by 1942. He completed the public takeover of the New York City Subway system. Every dollar was spent on things people could see and use and credit to government competence. The point is not that La Guardia raised taxes or cut taxes. The point is that he ran the government like someone who intended it to work.
La Guardia was reelected twice. A panel of 69 scholars in 1993 ranked him as the best big-city mayor in American history. When he left office, his estate was worth $8,000 in war bonds. The doom loop that now seems inescapable (”government doesn’t work, so cut taxes, so government works less, so cut taxes further”) did not run in La Guardia’s New York, because he broke the first link in the chain. He made government work. Trust followed. Revenue was sustained.
Warren: how to handle a surplus without destroying the future
Earl Warren served as governor of California from 1943 to 1953, the only governor in state history elected to three consecutive terms. He governed during the postwar boom, a period of extraordinary revenue growth. His approach to that surplus is the precise mirror image of what Republican (and now Democratic) governors are doing today.
In his first inaugural address, Warren acknowledged that California’s surplus had come “very largely from taxes upon war industry” and warned that it came “in trust, for it is the money of all the people of California.” Then he said something that every governor currently dismantling the property tax should be required to read: “This surplus, by its very existence, constitutes a constant temptation to everyone to spend it just because it is there. ... I hold to the conviction that this money must be lifted above the dissipating reach of grab-bag tactics.” He explicitly warned against converting cyclical windfalls into structural commitments, the exact error that every state currently eliminating property taxes is making.
Warren did not return the money. He invested it. He presided over massive expansions of California’s highway system, hospital network, and education infrastructure. He increased unemployment insurance, raised pensions for the elderly, subsidized child-care centers, reformed the prison system, and created the State Department of Mental Hygiene. And in his second inaugural address, he argued that any surplus beyond current requirements “should be conserved for two vital needs. One of these is to maintain adequate hospitals, educational and other institutional facilities. The other is to provide for the rainy day which sooner or later comes into the lives both of people and governments.”
The formulation that matters most, though, is this one: “It is not wise, under such circumstances, to blindly trade tax stability for temporary advantage.” That sentence, written seventy-five years ago, is the precise diagnosis of what Texas, Florida, Wyoming, and the rest are doing right now. They are trading the stability of a diversified revenue base for the temporary political advantage of announcing a tax cut. Warren saw this temptation and rejected it. California voters rewarded him three times.
Then California dismantled everything he built. In 1978, voters passed Proposition 13, which capped property taxes at 1 percent of assessed value, rolled assessments back to 1975 levels, and limited annual increases to 2 percent. Property tax revenue was halved overnight, from $10.3 billion to $5.04 billion in a single year. Before Prop 13, property tax accounted for 90 percent of all local government tax income. A year later, the same anti-tax movement passed the Gann Limit (Proposition 4), which capped per capita tax revenue spending at 1979 levels and required the excess be distributed to taxpayers in a rebate. Warren had said that surpluses must be “lifted above the dissipating reach of grab-bag tactics.” The Gann Limit legally mandates grab-bag tactics. When the state collects more than the cap allows, the constitution requires the excess be split between taxpayer rebates and school funding rather than invested in infrastructure, housing, or any of the other things Warren spent his surpluses on. In 2022, California redirected $48 billion in surplus funds and issued $9.5 billion in taxpayer refunds to stay under the ceiling. The rainy day fund that Warren insisted on? Constitutionally capped. The surplus investment he modeled? Legally prohibited above a threshold set in 1979. Two ballot measures, co-authored by the same anti-tax crusaders, converted Warren’s governance philosophy into a constitutional violation.
And now the irony has completed its arc. Katie Porter, the progressive frontrunner in the 2026 governor’s race, a former student of Senator Elizabeth Warren, is campaigning on eliminating California’s state income tax for anyone earning under $100,000. She has also opposed the billionaire tax ballot measure that would fund healthcare and education, arguing it could hurt the state’s ability to fund priorities. Earl Warren governed California for a decade on the principle that surpluses must be invested, not returned. His would-be progressive successor is running in his state, in the office he held, on a tax cut. The Washington Post noted today that the California governor’s race has become an experiment in how far tax cuts can take a Democrat in one of the bluest states in the country. Warren could have told them. He ran the opposite experiment seventy-five years ago. It worked.
The mutual reinforcement is what neither the state story nor the federal story captures alone. States cut their floors assuming federal capacity exists. The federal government cut its own capacity. Both assumptions failed simultaneously. The Iran shock did not create the vulnerability. It arrived at the exact moment both circuits closed, a stress test for an infrastructure that had been quietly failing for decades.
The price of civilization
The Iran commodity shock is not an interruption to the tax-cut story. It is its logical conclusion. The political class spent forty-five years dismantling the public investment infrastructure in the name of giving money back, and now faces a supply disruption that can only be absorbed by governments with strong revenue bases, working local services, and the fiscal capacity to respond. Instead: school districts that just lost their funding floor. Local governments told to figure it out. A federal government running a $1.9 trillion deficit before the first missile was fired. And the people most likely to be hurt are not the Boomers who voted for the cuts but the younger workers whose schools lost funding, whose libraries closed, whose local governments can no longer respond.
The “taxes are for suckers” feeling is not irrational. It emerged from a real failure of government to deliver. But both parties have now chosen to treat the symptom, the felt sense of being overcharged for underperformance, by cutting the revenue that funds the performance. It is the political equivalent of a hospital cutting its budget by eliminating doctors.
La Guardia and Warren already demonstrated the alternative, and the through-line in everything they did was operational, not financial. They did not govern from a spreadsheet. La Guardia replaced 15,000 patronage jobs with merit hires. Warren treated surpluses as a fiduciary obligation rather than a political opportunity. Both invested in visible infrastructure, funded it progressively, and refused to swap stable revenue for volatile alternatives. The contemporary political class treats government as a balance sheet to be optimized through cuts. La Guardia and Warren treated it as an organization to be run well. The difference is not ideological. It is the difference between a CFO who cuts headcount to hit a quarterly number and a COO who fixes the production line. One makes the next quarter look better. The other makes the next decade work. Both were WW2 era Republicans. Both won repeatedly.
The only novel element available now is cheap energy: for the progressives is that solar auction prices have fallen below two cents per kilowatt-hour, and driving energy costs down far enough would make the Strait of Hormuz less relevant and Americans wealthier without cutting a single tax.
For the conservatives, it’s just a matter of finding the willpower to finance the Wildcatters so that they can do what they love to do in times of high oil prices, drill baby drill. That would require pissing off Scott Sheffield, who conspired with OPEC before to keep oil prices high, and Wall Street though.
That both parties looked at this menu and chose the tax cut instead tells you everything about where we are.
The anti-tax feeling that has dominated American politics for nearly half a century was a legitimate response to a government that stopped delivering. The answer is not to cut taxes. The answer is to start delivering again.
The political class chose a different answer.
They chose the buyback.