At 250, America Must Rethink Who Its Tax System Serves.
Anniversaries are often an opportunity to celebrate. They can also be a chance to take stock. As America approaches its 250th birthday, Portia Allen-Kyle looks at the history of taxation as a story about power, belonging, and representation. Her reporting explores how fiscal policy has shaped inequality across race, class, and gender—and what it would take to create a tax system that serves a more inclusive vision of democracy.
The Tax Code America Needs for the Next 250 Years
As we approach this anniversary, the history of American taxation offers something more than a civics lesson. It reveals how fiscal policy has long been used to draw lines around belonging—and how it might be used, differently, to redraw them.
By design, taxation was built without any meaningful representation to women, enslaved people, Indigenous peoples, or even many white men without property, neither contemplating their needs nor accounting for their contributions.
From the Reporter’s Notebook 📓
In my work on tax justice, I am intimately familiar with the inequities built into our tax code, but zooming out and researching the history and legacy of taxation made it crystal clear that taxation has been a tool of exclusion in multiple forms. By my third interview, the arc of the story came into focus, but I wanted to make sure to balance the harsh legacy of taxation with the promise of possibility. There is a bridge from the technicalities of tax policy to the possibility of our democracy. The optimism of those like Professor Dorothy A. Brown and Taifa Butler affirm the world that is possible if we overhaul the current tax code and orient it toward justice.
— Portia Allen-Kyle
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