Allow me a brief twitter thread parable that I hope illustrates something that is seriously broken with our policy debate.

Imagine there is a small town that gets electricity from a privately owned and operated power plant, and which charges everyone $10 a month. 1/7

Now, the plant is kinda poorly run. There are outages pretty often. And the outages always seem to affect some parts of town, but not others. There was even that time a few months back when everyone, except the richest neighborhood, was without power for a whole week! 2/7

One day, things come to a head and the owners of the plant announce they’ll be shutting it down! Oh no!

Fortunately, the town government says they can take over the plant. Instead of the monthly payment to the power company, households will instead pay a yearly tax of $100. 3/7

The next day, a local paper, The Weasel Gazette, blares the following headline “TOWN COUNCIL PROPOSES NEW $100 TAX TO KEEP THE LIGHTS ON.” Some people are outraged! New taxes?!? No way! How dare they?! 4/7

The town council chairwoman points out that the new tax would be replacing the monthly $10 charge everyone used to pay, so actually everyone will save $20. But her political opponents smell blood in the water and charge her with being a tax hiker! 5/7

The town spends weeks debating whether or not the new power tax really counts as a tax and if they should consider the fact that they used to pay more. Meanwhile, the power plant shuts down, everything goes dark and the town descends into apocalyptic chaos. 6/7

Moral of the story: It’s really stupid and misleading to focus only on taxes and not on the services those taxes pay for, the other costs those taxes replace, or the other ways that taxes help structure markets. 7/7