[BRIEF NOTE] On taxpayers and citizens

[rfmcdonald]

The Tin Man has a post up reacting to US president candidate Mitt Romney's identification of 47 percent of the American population being disqualified as political actors because they don't pay income tax. He notes that there's a very real and dangerous shift in language, in the United States and elsewhere, deemphasizing the concept of the citizen in favour of the much more limited concept of "taxpayer". Here in Toronto, Rob Ford has famously talked about Toronto's inhabitants as taxpayers, promising to save them money, and not talked about citizenship very much at all. (Toronto, it should be noted, had property qualifications for voting at the municipal level into the 1960s.)

When our country was founded, most states had property qualifications for voting. In other words, you weren’t eligible to vote unless you owned property. The idea was that only stakeholders knew the relative costs and benefits of different economic policies; if you didn’t have any “skin in the game,” as it were, then you were unaffected by policy choices or couldn’t possibly be aware of the effects of those policy choices. As our society became more democratic over the first half of the nineteenth century, states reduced or even eliminated these property qualifications.

Today, the idea that there should be a property qualification for voting seems ridiculous. Under such a rule, nobody who rented an apartment would be allowed to vote.

Now, those who decry the mooching 47 percent aren’t saying that the 47 percent — which includes the elderly, the working poor, war veterans, and others — shouldn’t be allowed to vote. But the sentiment is similar. Certain people are better than others because they “produce” and pay taxes. Everyone else doesn’t count. (Except that it’s apparently all-American to try to pay as little taxes as you possibly can.)

[. . .]

There’s this subtext (and sometimes it’s not even the subtext — it’s the actual text) that certain people just shouldn’t be allowed to participate in our democracy. We got rid of property qualifications in this country sometime before the Civil War; some people seem to want to bring them back in some form.

But being a human being is about more than owning property.

And “taxpayer” is not a synonym for “citizen.”