Nobody likes paying taxes. Mark Twain once famously said that the only difference between a tax collector and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin. But the notion that government needed to collect enough taxes to finance its operations was widely but grudgingly accepted across society.
That began to change in the late 1970s as an anti tax movement was born in California. That movement has come to dominate Republican (and occasionally Democratic) policy over the last 50 years resulting in a massive national debt. The history of the anti tax movement is laid out in a new book – The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked American. We are lucky to be joined by the author, Professor Michael Graetz.