What we do together

I wrote earlier in the month about a glimmer of hope: the scale of the Hands Off protests on April 5th, which built on thousands of smaller actions to display the force standing against Trump, Musk, and their allies. In the weeks since, we’ve seen a few other positive signs, like Harvard saying nope to Trump’s shakedown and having another 200+ college and university leaders say nope in advance, knowing they might be next.

Unfortunately, the daily news is still a mostly horrible torrent of illegal and extraordinary measures deployed to dismantle public services, violate human and civil rights, send the economy into a tailspin, enable corruption, support dictators abroad, and attack any institution that might oppose the authoritarian takeover. It will continue to be a horrible torrent for a while.

But underneath that torrent, a somewhat more mundane plundering is also underway—not through DOGE or firings or crony contracts, but through the tax code. Unlike so much else of what the regime is doing, this plundering is largely within the bounds of the constitution and regular legislation. That doesn’t make it okay, of course. The tax code is already tilted toward making oligarchs and billionaires richer while everyone else feels insecure about their economic futures. Republicans in Congress are trying to dig that hole deeper.

What they’re doing is deeply unpopular. They’re only able to consider it because of all the ways the democratic system has been rigged: gerrymandering insulating extremists from general election challenges, billionaires threatening fence-sitters with primary challenges, fake stories about voter fraud used to make voting harder than it needs to be, an information ecosystem awash with bad faith takes and disinformation—not to mention the actual threats of violence lawmakers face.

This plundering is generating less news and less outrage on social media. That’s partly because the policy debate gets quickly confusing, with acronyms like SALT or TCJA and jargon about budget resolutions, reconciliation, policy baselines, and the Byrd rule. It feels disconnected from the concrete experience most of us have with taxes, when we have to figure out how much we owe each April. That experience makes this hard enough political terrain: filing taxes is more confusing than it needs to be and the best outcome for most people is just getting back some of the money we already paid.

Adding to the complications, tax policy isn’t just one policy: it’s hundreds of policies, across multiple levels of government, that shape how we both collect and also spend public resources. Taxes touch almost everything government does. When we use the word “taxes”, what most people hear is “that money I pay in April” but what we’re really talking about is “everything we do together as a society”.

It’s like we have this huge dashboard of dials in front of us. We can dial up the Child Tax Credit and make it refundable, which means lifting children out of poverty. Or we can maintain low taxes for the rich and keep funding a massive defense sector, which will mean cutting Medicare and seeing more people dying or going into debt fighting preventable diseases. Choosing tariffs (not set by the budget bill, but effectively a tax) means higher grocery prices, and possibly a global recession. Choosing to gut the IRS means making it easier for billionaires to cheat on their taxes.

These are all choices, yet it’s hard to see which dials are wired to which changes. Too much of what we do with public resources is made invisible or taken for granted, from keeping the air breathable for a kid with asthma to discovering new cancer treatments to building a new playground at the local park. When we do talk about what government does, it’s usually to complain: we grumble about the potholes without congratulating ourselves for creating the road in the first place.

Expecting better is good. We should hold government to account—so long as we can also see how democratic, responsive government plays a necessary role in any large-scale positive change or collective effort. We should celebrate the things government does well, and push back against the stale cliches about inefficiency at places like the DMV.

This doesn’t mean defaulting to a defense of government. For the last few years, many elected Democrats took on that role in the face of the right’s relentless assault on every institution from elections to scientific research to libraries. That was a problem, not to mention an electoral liability, because those institutions are failing so many people. We should be repairing and rebuilding government where needed, because it’s what we need—but not as response to Republicans tearing it down, because when we say “oh they have a point, but they go too far” then we frame things in their terms, and we’re halfway to losing.

At all levels of government, and on every policy issue, a big part of how we fight back against authoritarianism is creating hope for a better future where a bigger we does better together. Who, how, and how much we tax is a big part of that.

One piece of what that better future looks like: universal childcare.

I’ll confess that I didn’t think much about the childcare system before we had kids. But I had a truly bizarre wakeup call just after our eldest was born. A friend introduced me to someone they knew who was opening a new daycare in the neighborhood. We met up at a coffee shop. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I didn’t expect them to show up with a slidedeck. I soon learned this person had no background in childcare: they were coming most recently from a finance job. What they were opening was a new branch of a private equity-backed chain that would have over a dozen classrooms. They hadn’t even built it yet, let alone hired any staff. Needless to say, we decided not to send our kid there.

I think a lot more about childcare now, and I think more people do as well, because there’s been more coverage and more recognition in the last few years of just how broken the sector has gotten. Small providers are struggling to pay workers living wages, while chains like the one I encountered corner local markets and cut quality to increase profit margins. Meanwhile the Trump administration has been threatening Head Start (which serves nearly 800,000 poor children nationwide) and states like Idaho are leading the charge to remove safety and quality protections.

There’s no easy fix here, but one part of the answer is some form of universal childcare. One small way I’ve been involved in this work is through supporting New Yorkers United for Childcare—a group that’s been leading the fight to protect and expand universal pre-K, 3-K, and childcare funding in NYC and whose founder is definitely someone who started thinking about childcare before having kids.

🗽 If you’re a parent in NYC: it looks like rain this Saturday (4/26), so what better activity than joining us for a family-friendly fundraiser at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum?

🗓️ If you’re not in NYC: check out Community Change’s upcoming Day Without Childcare events (5/12).

I wanted to highlight a new collaboration between Baratunde Thurston and Jon Alexander telling the stories of local democracy, self-governance, and bridge building. Here’s the first in the series: Libraries are hubs for citizen-ing

Find more on the full series here.

Trump just made it harder to have a kid in America [Anna North / Vox]

The Trump Billionaires Who Run the Economy and the Things They Say [Elisabeth Bumiller / NYT]

So You Want to Be a Dissident? [Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer / The New Yorker - click here to jump the paywall]

Sen. Chris Murphy on the Crisis Facing Democracy [David Remnick, Chris Murphy / On the Media]

Columbia Canceled My Course on Race and Media. I'm Going to Teach It Anyway. [Karen Attiah]

It was never about antisemitism [Marisa Kabas]

NYC mayoral candidate finally held accountable [Zohran Mamdani / Instagram]

When They Go Home After Working All Day, It’s Not to a Home [Eliza Shapiro / NYT]

ICE Took His Son From Their Bronx Apartment. Now He’s in El Salvador’s Mega-Prison. [Paz Radovic / The City and Documented]

Taking over your county party [Western Water Girl / TikTok]

This newsletter was written while listening to Ozomatli’s 2001 album Embrace the Chaos and the track “Dos Cosas Ciertas”.