Make the Winners Pay

Imagine a law called the Voter Accountability Act. Or call it the Max Tax, if you like. If a party wins control of government and runs a deficit, everyone who voted for it pays 10 percent more in income taxes during deficit years. If the budget balances, rates stay normal. Voters on the losing side get a 10 percent discount on their tax bills. Non-voters pay the ordinary rate.

So described, the Max Tax sounds like justice ringing the doorbell. Whoever installs the government gets the invoice. In other words, if you really want things done your way, then you have to pay for it.

I like the idea. But I also know it would probably create a clusterf—.

Still, the ways it might fail tell us as much about the absurdity of our current system as they do about the proposal itself. So, for kicks, let’s run the thought experiment on Election Day here in the US.

When Losing Pays

The first problem with the Max Tax is that it turns democracy into a game far fewer would want to win.

Imagine you’re a committed partisan. You know both parties will run deficits because, well, that’s what they do. Under the Max Tax, voting for your preferred candidate could cost you 10 percent more in income taxes. Voting for the loser, even one you can’t stand, could save you money.

Suddenly, losing has its privileges.

You might vote for the other guy, stay home, or secretly hope your own party loses. Better yet, you might want your party to control just enough of Congress to obstruct the opposition without taking responsibility for governing.

The incentives get stranger as you move up the economic food chain.

Wealthy voters might happily pay the surcharge in exchange for favorable regulations, subsidies, or contracts. Organized blocs would coordinate strategic abstentions or play all sides as usual.

Meanwhile, candidates might discover that being unelectable is an electoral asset. Imagine the campaign slogan: Vote for me. I promise to lose.

Or so it would seem.

As voters defect to candidates they expect to lose, yesterday’s sure loser could become tomorrow’s winner. The more people chase the discount, the more elusive it becomes. Elections would turn into a hall of mirrors, where voters try to outguess one another rather than choose who should govern.

Crazy, huh? Now consider the system we already have.

Politicians routinely benefit from policies whose costs they defer to future generations. Parties campaign against spending they previously supported, and the reverse. Legislators take credit for popular programs while blaming their opponents for the taxation and debt required to fund them. Voters demand more and more benefits for themselves while complaining about inflation—most of which is caused by people voting for politicians who promise more benefits.

Under the Max Tax, we said that voters would have incentives to lose elections. Under the current system, politicians have incentives to win elections by promising things their supporters think they won’t have to pay for, but they always do.

Which is more absurd?

At least the Max Tax makes our system’s absurdities more transparent.

Whose Deficit Is It, Anyway?

Suppose we try to improve the Max Tax by making it more precise.

Instead of taxing everyone who voted for the winning party, why not tax only those who elected the politicians responsible for the deficit?

That sounds reasonable until we look at who those politicians are.

In a Westminster parliament with a single-party majority, attribution would be simpler. The government is the party, and the party creates the budget. Coalitions muddy even that, though.

Here in Yankeeland, Congress controls the purse and the president signs or vetoes legislation. One party might control the House, another the Senate. Meanwhile, much of the federal budget consists of obligations enacted years or decades earlier. And a recession can produce a deficit even without new spending commitments.

So whom do we charge?

We could trace responsibility to individual roll-call votes. But politicians would immediately learn to game that system, too. Party leaders could let vulnerable members vote against deficit budgets while safer members supplied the votes needed to pass them.

The same politicians who brought you trillion-dollar deficits would bring you more elaborate schemes to make sure nobody could be held responsible—at least nobody important.

But wait. Isn’t that kinda what they do already?

Every politician claims credit for the goodies and disclaims responsibility for the cost. Presidents blame Congress. Congress blames presidents. Republicans blame Democrats. Democrats blame Republicans. Everyone blames the previous administration.

When all else fails, they blame circumstances beyond their control.

A deficit isn’t the result of a single decision. It’s the accumulated consequence of thousands of decisions made by different people at different times for different reasons.

The Max Tax would make assigning responsibility a bureaucratic nightmare. Our current system simply dispenses with that assignment. Nobody gets the bill personally, so everybody can pretend the charges came from somebody else.

We call this fiscal policy.

The Price of Accountability

But the Max Tax’s fatal flaw is even more sinister.

To administer it, the government would have to know exactly how you voted.

The secret ballot is one of the few protections ordinary citizens have against political retribution. The government already knows whether you voted, and often your party registration. It does not know whom you chose.

Under the Max Tax, your vote would become a permanent entry in a government database, linked to your income, identity, and tax liability.

Once that information exists, how long before someone finds another use for it?

Future administrations could make vast enemies lists. Employers could discriminate. Political organizations could threaten or reward voters based on their electoral histories. We’d set out to make government more accountable to voters. Instead, we would have made voters more vulnerable to government.

This danger already has uncomfortable precedents. Consider the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party organizations under Lois Lerner, or the allegations of an expansive political dragnet surrounding the Jack Smith investigations. The circumstances differ, and the controversies remain. But both raise questions about how easily the machinery of government coercion can be turned against political adversaries.

We already maintain vast databases of citizens’ earnings, property, transactions, and financial obligations. Political organizations already assemble detailed voter profiles. Governments already possess extraordinary powers to reward favored constituencies and punish disfavored ones through the tax code, the regulatory state, and the public purse.

The Max Tax might indeed cross a dangerous new line by directly linking a secret ballot to a tax liability. Yet the underlying temptation of authority is hardly new. The plan is to acquire political power, identify who should pay, and use the apparatus of authority to make them pay.

Remember the public list of pied-à-terre list of properties and owners in NYC? This wasn’t just about taxing the rich. It was about doxxing them.

The Max Tax would turn one’s voting profile into an official record that streamlines targeting the opposition. It would also make that record reveal less. Once ballots carry a price, people vote for discounts as well as their convictions. So the state would hold a precise list of choices that no longer reveal what anyone actually believes, and retribution would fall on tax strategy mistaken for partisan allegiance.

The Absurdity We Know

So the Max Tax is a terrible idea.

I still like it, though. Not because it would work, but because its failure exposes the peculiar arrangements we’ve come to regard as normal.

Consider the basic proposition of electoral politics. Millions of people vote for competing visions of government. One coalition wins, often with considerably less than a majority of eligible citizens behind it. Its leaders then claim a mandate to impose their preferred policies on everyone, including those who voted against them, those who abstained, and those who weren’t old enough to object.

The winners get to govern. The losers get governed. Everybody has to pay.

When today’s voters demand more government than they’re willing to finance, politicians borrow against tomorrow’s taxpayer earnings. The unborn don’t get a vote, but they inherit the debt and the inflation that follows.

Familiarity and habit hide how strange this arrangement is.

The Max Tax would create perverse incentives, encourage strategic voting, reward political manipulation, and make accountability nearly impossible to assign. Yet each of those distortions already has a counterpart in the political system we inhabit.

The difference is that we’ve grown accustomed to one system's absurdities while recoiling from another's.

Of course, government requires “collective” decisions, and collective decisions impose costs on dissenters. The question is how far that power should extend, how firmly we should constrain it, and how transparently we account for its costs.

We recoil at the thought of making voters pay for the government they choose. Yet we scarcely blink at making everyone pay for a government they may never have chosen.

The Max Tax isn’t a solution. It’s a mirror.