The Tax-To-Spend Myth Fuels Hatred And Oppression Of The Poor And Marginalized

A recent Facebook meme demonstrates that a major source of contempt for the poor and marginalized is the tax-to-spend myth - and progressive and liberal people's dignification of it.

If You Think That They Are Getting Your Money…

I've seen enough.

You've heard that phrase in recent election cycles, haven't you?  “I’ve seen enough.” 

It is said, followed by the calling of some election for a candidate, by some pundit when not all of the voting precincts for some election have yet to report voting totals but the trends seem to point safely toward a specific result.

That’s about how I felt in late December and early January when several progressive, socialist, and liberal Facebook pages with large followings were posting this iteration of the Jim Halpert Whiteboard Meme.

I had known that the dangerous monetarist lie of tax-to-spend - and progressive and liberal people’s validation of it - was a major factor in the contempt of the poor and the marginalized by everyone else, contempt that leads to austerity and oppression and prevents solidarity, but, now, I am certain of it.

I had known that the puzzling phenomenon of what I have come to call The Fallacy Of Money Consumability - and progressive and liberal people’s even-more-puzzling validation of it - was a major factor in the contempt of the poor and the marginalized by everyone else, contempt that leads to austerity and oppression and prevents solidarity, but, now, I am certain of it.

I would like for you to take note of two things about this meme.

I would like for you to note two things that it does not say.

One of those two things is something that it really should say.

The other is something that it should not be expected to say.

First, the meme claims that “your life sucks because of the rich,” but it doesn’t bother saying how and why the rich are what makes others’ lives suck.  So, the claim is open not only to refutation by those who disagree with it but also to varying interpretations by those who do agree with it!

Second, please note that the meme says absolutely nothing about taxes!

You probably can already guess why I am mentioning that, right?

Seriously, it’s important. It may not seem relevant, but I think that it very much is, and you’re about to see evidence of why.

Let’s review a couple of things.

The “Taxpayer” Myth And The Tax-To-Spend “Common Pot” Myth

Money is a unit of account that measures debt.  Currency, by contrast, is debt, the government’s transferable debt, measured in a money unit of account.  Currency is not a commodity, the idea that it is is a conservative-libertarian myth, but even most progressive, liberal, and socialist persons operate within the Commodity Theory Of Money - and it sabotages progress toward justice and only reinforces the conservative-libertarian worldview.

The Commodity Theory Of Money and The Fallacy Of Money Consumability give rise to “taxpayer” identity and thinking, which is morally repugnant in every context.  A disturbingly large number of people who think of themselves as anti-fascist, as progressive, as liberal, or as socialist think, speak, and operate in terms of a “collection plate” narrative of taxation, staking out their positions from within a dishonest conservative-libertarian framework.

Because of these horrid mythologies, when people hear or even imagine the government doing anything that involves paying money currency to anyone, nearly everyone reflexively imagines having some of his own currency or someone else’s currency being what funds the measure.

Do you see why it is paramount for progressive and justice-minded people to ditch this conservative-libertarian mythology? We will not build the society that we want for as long as most people automatically guard their wallets or imagine that someone else’s wallet will be robbed any time that we talk about universal healthcare or a high-speed passenger-rail system or canceling student debt or whatever.

The Fallacy Of Money Consumability

My journey to becoming someone very-barely well-known for advocacy about education about money began when I had my first paying job in high school, working on construction sites.  The first project on which I worked was a medical clinic that was next to a public housing project, and I began to imagine that this clinic would serve these poor people whom I had been told were moochers of us white people’s “tax dollars.”

Since I was getting a paycheck from working to serve these supposed moochers funded by my - or my family’s, because this was the first time that I had a taxable income - “tax dollars,” I began to realize that something was really wrong with the story that all of us are told about taxation and government spending: it’s based on the assumption that the currency that governments or government-benefits recipients spend just somehow ceases to exist!

The person who survives off of government cash benefits has no cash at the end of the month.  All of the cash that he had is in the possession (until they spend it) of those involved in the production and provision of the goods and services that he consumed, and, yet, somehow, we act like those people are burdened by this process!

We are told that workers are burdened, whether this burden is noble or unjust, with having to fund Social Security benefits for other people, which makes sense only if you think that Social Security recipients are not spending their paychecks, because, when they spend their paychecks, they are funding the wages of the workers who are supposedly burdened in this process.

We are told that student-debt cancelation would be “paid for” by people who never went to college, like plumbers and electricians, and, most infuriatingly, most Democrats agree with this horrid premise, but a major reason for the push for student-debt cancelation is that student debt has become so onerous that it is preventing people from buying homes or even moving out from their parents’ homes. Solving this problem would necessitate the construction of more homes, which would send currency to the plumbers, electricians, and carpenters whom we are told would somehow be burdened by student-debt cancelation!

If currency that governments spend comes from “taxpayers,” then currency that governments spend also goes to “taxpayers.”  A fundamental rule of macroeconomics that began to become obvious to me when I was working on construction sites while I was in high school (which is why the so-called “Paradox Of Thrift” never seemed like a paradox to me) but that seems absent from most of our political debates is that spending equals income, that one person’s spending necessarily is other persons’ income, that one person’s income necessarily is other persons’ spending.

Yet, somehow, nearly all people who present as progressive, liberal, or socialist act as though currency is consumed, in a way that puts targets on marginalized people - because they are perceived as “taxeaters.”

Later in this essay, I am going to explain this puzzling and troubling phenomenon further in my analysis of a comment left by a Nicholas A. Houllis. Please give it some thought and imagine a way out of the trap, like pointing out to anyone playing the “that’s MY money” game that social-welfare spending funds our taxable incomes in the first place.

The Evidence From This One Meme Is Overwhelming

Here, I present images of comments from posts of this meme from five Facebook pages: The Omniscient Observer, Being Progressive Is Good, Actually, Brave New Films, Democratic Socialism Now, and U.S. Democratic Socialists.

I’ll start with the post of this meme by The Omniscient Observer.

The most important question here is why people who hate on poor people think that they can get away with claiming to be robbed by poor people on benefits, and the answer is right there in the above image.  One person is objecting to the message of the meme, and the other is objecting to the first person’s objection.

But the second person is validating the dishonest premise of the first person’s objection.  The US Government does not forcibly take currency from people and give it to corporations or fund wars, because taxes do not fund anything.

Arc En Ciel Poussin is only further validating the reactionary premise that subsidies are bad, a premise that will always harm the poor and the marginalized more than it will anyone else, because he is validating the reactionary premise that governments spend “other people’s money.”  He is enabling hatred for - and, thus, the oppression of - the poor and the marginalized by legitimizing the most effective mythology, and a dishonest one at that, used against poor people.

As this other commenter points out, there are always more poor people than there are more rich people.

Therefore, there are more people who will suffer in more meaningful ways from this deadly mythology than there are rich people.

This next comment seems to be describing the common mythology that currency and markets somehow precede the state and, thus, state spending.

I described in detail the problem of this mythology in a couple of my aforelinked essays.

Next, let’s look at a couple of comments from the Being Progressive Is Good, Actually page’s post of this meme.  

It starts with a respondent who seems to not harbor any antipathy to poor people receiving benefits but who still nonetheless questions the premise.

Once again, we see someone who seems to agree with the message of the meme responding in a way that validates the first commenter’s tax-to-spend premise.

Below is just a more salty version of the same thing.

Once again, the person replying and taking issue with the meanness directed at poor and marginalized people only validates the premise of the person expressing meanness toward poor and marginalized people.

See the pattern?

Also, is there no better argument against the public authority that represents us blowing up kids overseas than “but my money is funding that”?

A major reason that people receiving government benefits are so hated is that a lie about government benefits is supplied by people who are purporting to defend the poor and marginalized people using benefits.

Let’s now look at comments on the post of this meme from the Brave New Films page.

You know exactly what answer this guy expects, don’t you?

Plenty of “progressives” will walk right into his trap.

As I first wrote on the occasion of Rush Limbaugh’s death, Rush Limbaugh helped to demonstrate the cruel heart of “taxpayer” identity and thinking.

Who gave Jeff Sims the impression that he or anyone else is “paying for” such benefits?

Who gave Marcin Klisiak the impression that “benefits cost money”? And who gave him the impression that this “money” is taken from - but never arrives in the form of market income, because, apparently, it is somehow ‘consumed’ in the process - the pockets of “the taxpayer”?

One of the answers to that question is people like Stan Shaufler, who seems to be defending the benefits on the basis that they “SAVE the taxpayers money.”  Yeah, what if they didn’t, though?

Another answer is people like Irene Mertz, who seems to be defending the benefits, who are validating the “pay into” notion of taxation - while also acting like the currency paid in benefits somehow ceases to exist (is ‘consumed’) before it reaches the supposedly-aggrieved “taxpayer.”

Because notice that Klisiak, in his response to Mertz is acting as though the currency is consumed.

Mertz again validates the premise.

Let’s talk about one thing that Houllis said, that people on benefits live off of a surplus.  What is not true is that they live off of a surplus of currency from the productive.  If that would be true, then it would validate the premise of “taxation is theft.”

What is true, however, is that they live off of a surplus of goods and services, but, in any exchange economy, this cannot be theft.  Even if we went full-on socialist and nationalized everything down to the local sandwich shop, paid jobs would still be based on exchange.  The funds to pay the sandwich shop employee might not come from the funds paid by the customer, but the employee’s job - the position at the sandwich shop - exists in the first place because enough people need sandwiches there to justify the existence of the position.

We are not subsistence farmers, laboring to produce our own product for our own use, but that is how we have been conditioned to think about our paychecks and, most especially and most insidiously, about our tax payments.  We have been conditioned to think that we were laboring for our own purposes, not for some kind of social purpose, on our own, and then the government comes and takes some of our stuff for the greater good.

But we live, work, function, and consume in an exchange economy based on specialization of labor and specialization of land, and essentially none of our political discussions suggest that we shouldn’t be, except to debate whether the government or the individual consumer will fund certain services.  Regardless of any policy change, we are and still will be paid to produce goods and services for other people, and we consume and still will be goods and services produced by other people.  Ignoring this oh-so-basic reality is part of the Fallacy Of Money Consumability.

So, it is, albeit not in the tax-to-spend sense that cruel persons use to justify their cruelty, true that people on benefits live on surpluses produced by others, but what is not true is that this constitutes any kind of burden, fair or unfair, on producers, because producers get paid by the benefits systems to labor to produce goods for others’ consumption.

If I could see this - it was difficult to not see it - when I was a teenager working on construction sites, realizing that I was getting paid to produce a facility that I imagined that would be used by the people whom I had been told all of my life were leeching from the rest of us, then why do most college-educated progressive and liberal people pretend to not see it?  Why do they dignify the Fallacy Of Money Consumability?

This is also why, as I have explained in my aforelinked essays, “taxpayer” identity and thinking is morally wrong at every level, not just when we are talking about the actions of the currency-issuing governments. It’s true that states and municipalities have to get money currency externally, but the currency that they spend still goes to the supposedly-aggrieved “taxpayers” roughly, depending upon how the tax is structured, as much as comes from them.

I come from a family of schoolteachers and worked for several years as a schoolteacher myself, and I am very sensitized to the “that’s MY money funding your salary, teacher boy” dynamic. But, regardless of the source of the currency paid to teachers, the entire point of paying teachers currency is so that teachers can exchange the currency with supposedly-aggrieved “taxpayers,” thus supplying “taxpayers” with the currency that constitutes their incomes, a portion of which is then paid in taxes. So, the Fallacy Of Money Consumability is integral to the “taxpayer” mythology.

Where I grew up, oil-field workers were and still are the archetypal “taxpayers,” proudly complaining that they are burdened with funding existing social-welfare spending and would be burdened with funding proposed social-welfare spending, but this makes no sense at all - and, yet, is questioned by essentially no progressive, liberal, or socialist entities.  Oil field workers’ incomes come entirely from the spending of others, and poor people spend all of their currency.

This commenter gets it!

But comments like his are rare and also get ignored.  Hordes of other “progressive” respondents agree with the premise of the people objecting to the message of the meme but just think that their priorities are off, like this guy.

All that this does is enables the bigots, leading back to stuff like this.

I guess that I’m supposed to assume that, when I buy stuff at the grocery store, nobody at the grocery store - and nobody who produced and delivered any of those groceries - is being paid any of what I just spent there, right?

Let’s now look at the post of this meme from the Democratic Socialism Now page.

What Brian Taylor says here is one of the stupidest and most counterproductive things that modern liberal and Democratic people say, and I can and wish to write an entire essay about just it.  For now, I’ll just say that it’s yet another example of using your opponents’ framing supposedly ‘against’ him but only reinforcing the framing in the process.  That’s bad.

There it is, the “common pot” narrative, which is based on a libertarian mythology and is completely wrong and counterproductive.  We will never succeed in building a more progressive and just society by operating within a conservative-libertarian monetarist framework, as Strelec is doing.

It leads precisely, inevitably, and obviously to stuff like this.

Okay, I’m going to show you three images of responses to this comment, which, as you can see, got plenty of comments!

The problem is that the four commenters whose comments you will see in the next three images affirmed his tax-to-spend, currency-as-a-consumable-commodity, “tax dollars” premise.

Corporations are legal constructs that we create to produce some goods and services.  It’s true that some of them - the people who run them - can and do get too powerful, but this doesn’t not mean that “bailouts” are necessarily bad.  Indeed, funding one way in which we influence the behavior of firms toward social ends.

Alison Bird may think that she has made some meaningful ‘own’ against this libertarian commenter, but she has accomplished nothing more than affirming his dishonest, reactionary, tax-to-spend, currency-as-a-consumable-commodity monetarist premise.

So, too, have these next two commenters.

They are fighting on his libertarian turf - and it’s why they get nowhere.

There is no benefit to dignifying the horrid conservative-libertarian premise that sovereign governments spend “other people’s money”; there is no benefit to dignifying the horrid conservative-libertarian premise that money currency is a consumable commodity.

But nearly all progressive, liberal, and socialist people constantly dignify - and operate within - those premises, which naturally leads us to stuff like this.

These next two images, the second one part of the responses to the first one, demonstrate why attempts at hypocrisy gotchas are almost always futile.

He asserts the horrid “tax payers” premise.  Accepting that horrid premise, someone responds thus, a way that an alarmingly large number of liberal people respond - and to an inevitable result.

What do you do now?  Great, you’ve gotten the person to be ‘consistent’ - based on these silly parameters in the first place - by demonstrating that he is against PPP loans and corporate subsidies in addition to being against social-welfare spending.

Where does this approach get us?

It gets us nowhere good.  PPP loans are good.  PPP loans being forgiven is good.  Corporate subsidies that achieve some good social outcome are good.  Social-welfare spending that succeeds in ameliorating the effects of poverty is good.  

We can have rational discussions about such things only once we ditch the stupid tax-to-spend myth and the currency-as-a-consumable-commodity myth.

Until then, we’re still stuck doing this tiresome, grotesque nonsense.

I ought to assert right here that there is some truth to what these guys are saying here.  If you actually believe that your currency taxes fund the government, and if you actually believe that the currency ceases to exist or is consumed somewhere in or very shortly the process of government funding, then it makes rational sense to think that people receiving government benefits are robbing you!

Sure, you could argue, as some of these respondents have done, that non-poor people also get government benefits, but you’re still playing your opponents’ game.  Who is likely to be more harmed by a general widespread opposition to government spending? The already-rich leaders of corporations? Or struggling poor and working class people?

You cannot help the powerless, the dispossessed, the poor, and the marginalized by taking a weapon that was specifically designed to harm them and using it against powerful people.  Like firing a pistol straight up into the air because some high-altitude bomber aircraft are flying over your town, you’re only sending the bullet against your own people.

Read the last comment from Anthony Lateano, way at the bottom.

Responses like that of Dustin Krautter are incredibly common and completely ineffective; he is responding to someone objecting to government spending by also himself objecting to government spending.  Actually, such responses are worse than ineffective, because they reinforce the conservative-libertarian premise of those objecting to social-welfare spending, described by Lance Loock here.

Accepting the monetarist premise that currency originates with “taxpayers” will get us nowhere good ever.

See, a “we should have higher taxes on the wealthy” is not a position that is mutually exclusive with “people on government benefits are a cause of my problems.”

Oh, here she goes again, in response to the comment shown above.

What Bird is saying is that the reason that corporations paying low wages is bad is not because wage earners need higher wages but because corporation paying low wages means that “taxpayers” are burdened with funding benefits for poor people.

What do you imagine that the logical conclusion of framing the problem that way would be?  

If the problem with government benefits is that they rob me, then I’m not going to care all that much if it wouldn’t happen if corporations paid higher wages.  I just want to stop being robbed.

We could just not play this game in the first place, you know.

Finally, we shall look at a few comments from the U.S. Democratic Socialists page’s post of this meme.

Oh, look at that silly nonsense!  It reminds me of “don’t worry, we won’t prosecute women who get abortions; we’ll just prosecute the medical professionals who perform the procedures.”  It infantilizes the actual victim while trying to shift blame for the victimization in a way that gets you the same result.

Again, taking a weapon that was design specifically to work against the powerless, the poor, and the marginalized and trying to use it against the powerful does not work against the powerful; it only reinforces the harm to the powerless.

There are very many problems with corporate oligarchy; that some firms get government funding is not one of them.

The idea that taxes fund spending leads to this kind of transactional thinking when your social ability to claim benefits is thought to ought to depend upon what you have first contributed.

Again,  a “tax the rich” mindset is not mutually exclusive with a “poor people on benefits are leechers, too” mindset for as long as you agree with and work within the “tax dollars” premise.

This is all just so bleakly transactional.

If “progressives” agree with the disgusting and disempowering premise that money comes from rich people, then responses like this should not be the least bit surprising.

This is a good point at which to remind you that the original meme said nothing about taxes or taxation!

But so many of these commenters are mentioning taxes or taxation.  Why is that?

The national debt is not a problem.  Not only that, the national debt is a good thing.

“Money is a finite resource, so money spent on benefits cannot be spent elsewhere” is completely wrong, is a monetarist mythology, but it is one that the overwhelming majority of progressive, liberal, and socialist people accept to our own great detriment.

Again, I guess that we’re supposed to just assume that currency is eaten by benefits recipients and converted into energy and feces or something, that nobody involved in the production of food gets currency spent by benefits recipients!

Conversations like this happen only within those silly premises!

“Progressives” can stop playing this game already, but they keep insisting on playing this rigged game.

There is only one way to win: to not play in the first place.

Conclusion

There, that was a long post with plenty of screenshot images, wasn’t it?

Yeah, I could have made it much shorter and perhaps still gotten my point across, but I think that the sheer volume of such comments just off of one meme (albeit shared on five different Facebook pages) helps to demonstrate how pervasive this deadly mythology goes.

The most useful thing that this meme accomplished is demonstrate how toxic the tax-to-spend myth and the Fallacy Of Money Consumability are, but we can’t take the meaningful next step until a critical mass of ‘progressive’ people internalize how poisonous these myths are.

Let’s work toward building that understanding.  ❤️