Opinion  /  Political Economy

If It Can Be Taxed, It Can Be Funded

The Democratic Socialists of America have built an entire policy platform on a single, unexamined premise: that the existence of a tax base is the same thing as the existence of a plan.

~ Helen B. Smith

By Helen B. Smith  |  Political Correspondent

Every ideology needs a sentence simple enough to fit on a picket sign, and the DSA has found theirs: if it can be taxed, it can be funded. It has the clean, self-evident ring of arithmetic. It is not arithmetic. It is a substitution — swapping the hard question of whether a program can be sustained for the easy question of whether a number exists somewhere to point at. Once that swap is made, every proposal becomes a matter of will rather than design, and anyone who raises a design question is recast not as a skeptic but as an obstacle: a defender of hoarded wealth, standing between the public and what it’s owed.

The Category Error

Taxable capacity is a snapshot. A funding stream is a forecast. The first tells you what exists today, sitting still, waiting to be counted. The second has to survive behavior — the fact that capital, income, and even people relocate when the cost of staying rises past the benefit of leaving. Wealth taxes across Europe are the case study nobody on the American left wants to cite: France’s ISF drove out an estimated tens of thousands of taxpayers before Paris scrapped it; Sweden, Denmark, and Germany all abandoned their wealth taxes for the same reason. The revenue that looked so solid on the whiteboard evaporated the moment it was asked to hold weight in the real economy.

This is the part the “tax the rich” slogan skips: a one-time seizure and a permanent entitlement are not the same instrument. Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee, cancelled student debt — these are recurring, escalating obligations. You cannot fund a permanent commitment with a revenue source that shrinks the moment you rely on it. That isn’t an opinion about fairness. It’s an observation about how tax bases actually behave under pressure, and it’s one the DSA’s own platform documents rarely engage with beyond a footnote.

Whose Money, and Under What Claim

Strip away the accounting question and there’s a moral one underneath it, and it’s worth saying plainly: the DSA’s fiscal worldview treats the existence of private wealth as itself a kind of unpaid debt to the collective — as though the money were always halfway to being public property, and taxation is just the paperwork catching up to that fact. That is a coherent political philosophy. It is not, however, “just funding public goods.” It’s a claim that production is owed to the community by default, and that the burden of proof runs against the person who earned it rather than the person who wants it redistributed. Reasonable people can debate that premise. What they can’t do is debate it honestly while calling it neutral bookkeeping.

“A tax base that can be pointed to is not the same thing as a program that can be sustained — and a movement that can’t tell the difference isn’t doing economics. It’s doing arithmetic theater.” — Helen B. Smith

The Incentive Problem Doesn’t Go Away Because You Ignore It

Every “if it can be taxed, it can be funded” proposal quietly assumes the taxed activity keeps happening at the same scale after the tax lands. But high earners don’t just sit still and absorb marginal rate increases — they restructure compensation, shift domicile, defer realization, and in the case of the truly mobile, leave outright. The tax base isn’t a fixed lake you can keep dipping a bucket into. It’s a herd that moves when it’s hunted. A serious funding proposal has to model that migration. A slogan doesn’t have to, which is exactly why the slogan is more popular than the modeling.

None of this is an argument against taxation, or against public investment, or against asking whether the wealthiest are paying their fair share — those are legitimate questions with legitimate answers on both sides. It’s an argument against treating “we found a number” as though it were the same accomplishment as “we built a plan that survives contact with human behavior.” The first is a headline. The second is governance. The DSA has gotten very good at producing the first and has never had to answer for how thin the second turns out to be, because by the time the bill comes due, the people who wrote the platform are rarely the ones asked to balance it.