Being a low earner had been relaxing. I didn’t attract attention. The chances of my being audited were low, because even governments have registered that you can’t get blood from a stone. But when my income spiked, I felt as if I were in an African game park in the days when they still were full of lions, and I’d done what the wardens always warn you not to: I’d got out of the car. Suddenly worth more than a gristly mouthful for tax authorities, I was fair game.

  Doubling my anxiety: I live most of the year in the United Kingdom, where I also pay taxes—although the United States demands that even nonresident Americans declare their worldwide income to the federal government. The United States is the sole country in the world with such a requirement. (The only nation imposing a kindred system is autocratic Eritrea, which levies a 2 percent tax on expats.) Despite the popularity of the term, for law-abiding Americans there’s no such thing as a “tax haven.” Even if Americans move to another country with lower tax rates, they are required to pay the shortfall to the feds. The only legal manner in which Americans can shelter any income from the IRS is to renounce their citizenship, often pay a whopping “exit tax,” and burn their passports—along with their bridges. Thus I felt hot breath panting from both sides of the Atlantic.

  I was a good little camper, and that year I delivered to the American and British governments an enormous proportion of my lifetime earnings. (For writers, America’s elimination of income averaging has been disastrous. It’s not that unusual to labor on a manuscript for a decade. In the improbable instance that the project is a success, you will be taxed as if you earned the proceeds in a single year.) Once I signed over a six-figure check to the US Treasury, I confess that I was furious. I felt robbed. I felt taken advantage of. In having my ship come in only to have the vessel boarded by pirates from the IRS—for entrepreneurs in America, doing well financially is like sailing the coast of West Africa—I felt like a sucker. These are the feelings that no one in the upper tax brackets will talk about in public. Indeed, I went through an abrupt paradigm shift. When I was skint, I naturally sympathized with other people who were struggling. For the first time, I felt just a teensy bit of sympathy for the rich. If I’m to continue to overshare: the very next year, my income plummeted, and thereafter continued to drop. I am much happier. I am much more relaxed. I’d be even more relaxed if I made less money still.

  Unfortunately, I marked myself as governmental prey for life. The IRS casts a suspicious eye on anyone who makes less money this year than the year before, especially a lot less. Indeed, in expecting the self-employed to forfeit not 100 percent but 110 percent of their previous year’s liability in estimated taxes, the IRS is eternally optimistic on your account. Apparently the one thing about my returns likely to select them for scrutiny is the alarming contrast between subsequent returns and my windfall year’s. In terms of pure safety—protection from bureaucratic and legal harassment—I’d be better off never having got out of my car in the game park.

  As both the United States and the United Kingdom rack up soaring national debts, earning any money at all in either country marks you as a target. These are very hungry lions, and the only sure protection against them is to be too scrawny to be worth the bother of hunting down.

  Worse, well-deserved public outrage over bank bailouts during the Great Recession—welfare for the superwealthy—and scandals like Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme or Fred Goodwin’s £700,000 annual reward for almost single-handedly imploding the Royal Bank of Scotland have helped stigmatize wealth itself. The default assumption now runs that all gains are ill gotten. The public seems to have forgotten that not everyone with an appreciable income is a shyster financier—that not everyone accumulates wealth by stealing, obscene over-remuneration, or dodgy wheeler-dealering. We no longer seem to believe that there may still be such a thing as someone who works hard and honestly doing something well. Further, (for now; Biden may revise this) both the British and American governments punish hard work as opposed to passive raking-it-in by taxing earned income far more viciously than capital gains—which is morally perverse. To a greater degree than any other form of income, earned money is fined. Experientially, earning money is a crime.

  In Estonia, universal contribution to the nation’s communal expenses structurally reinforces social cohesion, as well as giving taxpayers a sense of investment in how wisely their money is spent. But one of the most distressing results of the West’s more commonplace “progressive” tax policies is the way that they have divided citizenries into two camps: the takers and the taken. Client citizens look to government to solve problems and to give them money; they get irate when their problems are not solved well or when they’re not given enough money. To the involuntary patrons on whom the state depends for its very existence, government is overwhelmingly a predator. Government creates problems, and takes money. Politically and culturally, this division is poisonous. Folks at the bottom grow docile, and since no set of services or subsidies is ever sufficient, they get resentful. Having difficulty pointing to many real benefits that accrue to them from their prodigious taxes, higher earners get resentful, too. So polarized, neither camp enjoys any real sense of “community,” and everyone is ticked off.

  Moreover, client citizens—including public employees and contract workers for the state—never seem to exhibit any consciousness that what they get from “government” is confiscated from their neighbors; that, in a fiscal sense, government is merely a shell company, a clearinghouse. For that matter, since it doesn’t generate any wealth itself, “government” as a fiscal entity is a myth: it’s the dependent class’s imaginary friend. Anyone who suggested that recipients of state largesse should be grateful to their real benefactors—those evil rich people—would be savaged. For the notion that lower-income citizens or public employees should be thankful to the better off is anathema. I certainly felt no trace of gratitude toward high earners when I was hard up. After relinquishing a massive whack of my literary jackpot to people I didn’t know, I sure didn’t receive any thank-you notes, either. Instead I was left with the impression that I should have been grateful—that I had anything left.

  The top 1 percent of American taxpayers account for over 40 percent of total US income tax receipts. The top 10 percent pay 71 percent of income taxes, and the top 25 percent pay 87 percent, while the bottom 50 percent account for 3 percent. This disproportion has steadily risen since the mid-1980s. From 2010 onward, on average 44 percent of filers in the United States have paid no income tax, including 43 percent of middle-income earners.

  In the United Kingdom, even before the generous subsidies of the COVID era, over half of Britons were dependents on the state. In 2019, nearly half, 43 percent, paid no income tax—a ten-point rise over the previous decade. The top 1 percent of Britons pay over a third of income taxes, a proportion that’s doubled since 1990. As of 2017, the top 10 percent of individual income tax payers in Britain—6 percent of the adult population—were responsible for 59 percent of these receipts, while the top 50 percent paid 90 percent. The quip that only the poor pay taxes is sorely out of date.

  Yet ever since wealth was demonized by a handful of irresponsible financiers in 2008, the rich have become like smokers: one of those groups to whose defense no one dares to rise. The fact that a single packet of cigarettes in New York City now costs $12.85 sets an ominous precedent: well over half that price is taxes, and nothing stops that pack of twenty Marlboros from costing $100 tomorrow. For “sin taxes” are potentially infinite, and wealth is now a sin. The Tories have reduced the “additional rate” bracket to a hardly negligible 45 percent, but when the last Labour government created a new 50 percent top tax bracket, two-thirds of the British public polled as perfectly happy; it didn’t apply to them. Were that number ever to rise to pre-Thatcher levels of 90 percent, most of the British would be vengefully delighted.

  By contrast, in the back of their minds even many Americans of the lowliest economic station are convinced that someday they, too, will be rich, which keeps some check on confiscatory tax policies in the United States at the upper end. Nevertheless, the Biden administration’s proposed tax hikes on the affluent have met minimal popular resistance. New York City’s top state-and-local bracket is now nearly 15 percent; given the clatter of add-ons, affluent New Yorkers are in line to lose closing on two-thirds of their income to taxes. Just for a moment, try to overcome an understandable hostility toward the white truffle and Wagyu beef set and imagine how it might feel to have that proportion of your earnings confiscated. Are you purely chuffed that you’re able to be of such welcome assistance to others? Or are you perhaps resolved to find a cracking good accountant to reduce the bill, if not instead deciding to move to Florida, which at least has no state income tax, like so many New Yorkers since 2020?

  The Western state’s accelerating reliance on a precariously narrow tax base creates a society that isn’t contributory but patrician. Financing the better part of government through a small minority of the well off is inherently unstable. Should that dependency worsen further, it could prove unsustainable. Golden gooses can fly the coop. “Soak the rich” is reliably a vote winner, especially in Britain. But “the rich” do not pull in enough to cover an entire nation’s bills. Were congressional Democrats’ now-defunct 2021 “billionaires’ tax” to have commandeered all $4.1 trillion in the hands of its targets, the proceeds wouldn’t even have financed the $6 trillion of increased federal spending that Joe Biden proposed at the onset of his presidency. When the answer to every budget shortfall is once more to stick it to the prosperous, governments lull electorates into believing they can reap all the benefits of a welfare state for free.

  In the Continental European model, taxes are exorbitant, but at least the entire citizenry benefits from social services like paid maternity and paternity leave, often of six months to a year; after-school childcare; nursing home care for the elderly; and most conspicuously, health care. Yet the American model, which, with the exception of the National Health Service, Britain’s closely resembles, tax policy is largely redistributive: pay more, get nothing. Pay-even-more-still-get-nothing eventually pushes the sleepiest and most biddable of the well heeled to rebel. The drive to cheat or simply to leave becomes overpowering. Little wonder that Western leaders have mounted a sustained effort to shut down offshore tax havens, to ensure that there is nowhere to go.

  It’s always assumed that greedy rich people will keep toiling away even if they keep only ten cents on the dollar, because they’re so grasping that they’ll do anything for so much as a dime. Thus high tax rates do not discourage productivity or entrepreneurship. I think that assumption is open to question, and not only in the top tax bracket.

  Take a look at what’s been happening in both the United States and the United Kingdom when you get old and infirm. The state will pick up the tab for nursing home care, but only if you’ve failed to save for your retirement years yourself—that is, only if you’re destitute. If you’ve worked all your life and put together a reasonable pension, bought your own home and paid off your mortgage, and paid hefty taxes in the meantime, you’re expected to exhaust nearly all your assets, including selling your home and spending down the proceeds. Then the state will pay your nursing home fees, and not before. Since full-time private nursing home care can run to over $100,000 per year in both countries, this expense easily depletes a lifetime’s savings. So what is the point? Why not spend it all, or earn nothing to begin with, when the results in old age are the same?

  Most of all, this “the greedy will keep working for peanuts” theory doesn’t take into account the emotional experience of losing half or more of what you earn. In a fiscal environment of state voracity, earning money instills not satisfaction but fear. In a cultural environment in which wealth is suspect and is assumed to have been acquired through shady means, high earners feel criminalized—a sensation bolstered by a punitive tax regime. Nobody likes to be taken. When you put in long hours year after year only to have the proceeds of your labor donated to strangers, you feel like a chump. On top of that, nobody thanks you.

  To the contrary, politicians’ rhetoric suggests that your earnings are theirs to begin with, and they will let you have some of it back but only if you’re very good. We’re often told that to repair the national finances the wealthy have to do “their fair share.” On the contrary: the wealthy have to do their unfair share.

  Inured to those “progressive” tax regimes, Western publics routinely overlook the fact that for some able-bodied workers to pay 10 to 20 percent of their income to the state—or nothing at all—and for others to pay 50 percent doesn’t, on the face of it, represent any commonsense version of justice. Then again, for a president or prime minister to get on television and announce that it was time for the well off once again to do “their unfair share” wouldn’t sound so great on the nightly news.

  Even with a moderate income, I am disinclined to accept journalistic assignments unless I’m intent on putting a point across. I won’t accept a job for the money alone. Why should I hunch over my computer all day, when nearly half the fee goes to somebody else? In fact, since I have a childish streak, for me, high tax rates inspire spite: no, I won’t accept that assignment—I don’t feel like it. What I feel like is baking an apple cake. And never mind spite; a disinclination to work hard for little in return is perfectly rational.

  With that polite coyness that attends private fiscal matters, we don’t hear this very often, but surely earning money should be a pleasure. Why, it’s an underrated pleasure, one inherently more gratifying than going on a spending spree. Monetary reward means you’ve done something that other people value. Yet in a predatory tax environment, we’ve taken all the fun out of that direct deposit. Is this in the larger social interest?

  While governments design ever more top-heavy tax policy to justify yawning deficits, they fortify a giant moral hazard. Low income is rewarded. If you’re poor in America, medical care is free, and you’ll be taken care of in your old age for nothing. Higher income is penalized, and not only with punitive tax rates but with paperwork: printed out, my US federal tax returns would stack an inch thick. I’m obliged to hire accountants, whose fees amount to more taxes. Indeed, escaping the burden of filing multiple returns, paying two sets of estimated taxes, and conforming to the complex, conflicting tax codes of two different countries with two different tax years—none of that my idea of a good time—may be the prospect that most tempts me to leave the United Kingdom.

  For this isn’t purely about economics. It’s about politics. When a vast proportion of your earnings is appropriated, you’re not free. When you live in fear—of the IRS or Vladimir Putin, it doesn’t matter—you’re not free. When your time is colonized by mind-numbing, mandatory paperwork, you’re not free.

  Clearly, losing a job or a home to foreclosure is incomparably more anguishing than preyed-upon prosperity. I can’t emphasize enough: don’t for a moment imagine that I write this out of self-pity. Anyone relatively secure in parlous times is lucky (and all times are parlous, really). Yet the negative emotions I experienced during that one windfall year—from paranoia to suppressed fury—cannot be exclusive to me. Writ large, the feelings I’ve described demoralize a country’s productive citizens and enervate its economy. Resentment, especially the kind you’re not allowed to express in public, motivates cheating. It drives the wealthy to lobby politicians for exceptions, which is a leading reason tax codes are such a hash. Earning money out on the veldt—within sniffing distance of the rapacious lions of the state—is joyless. These days, the less I make, the happier I am. The more I make, the more I feel frightened, helpless, humiliated, and stupid.

  “Quote-Unquote”

  The Wall Street Journal, 2008

  [This is the full version of what, to my consternation, The Wall Street Journal commissioned and then chopped down to a stump. Lo, another opportunity to right past wrongs. This essay is an “interrogation,” as we say now, of the tiniest of flicks on the page, and picayune minutiae call for examinations of picayune thoroughness in return.]

  To put it mildly, literature is not very popular. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, nearly half of Americans do not read books at all. Those who do average six a year. Young people aged fifteen to twenty-four—readers of the future—now devote less than 3 percent of their leisure time to reading for pleasure. The review sections on which my own hoity-toity literary fiction depends for exposure are contracting; overnight this summer, the distinguished Los Angeles Times book section disappeared.

  In comparison with jouncing about the internet or lounging in front of the set, reading seems to demand an onerous degree of concentration. So you’d think that these days literary writers would be bending over backward to ingratiate themselves—to make their work maximally accessible, straightforward, and inviting. But no.

  Perhaps no single emblem better epitomizes the perversity of my colleagues than the lowly quotation mark. While the use of quotes to distinguish speech is still standard in English-language fiction, undemarcated dialogue has steadily achieved the status of an established style. In fact, this is one of those stealthy trends that no one confronts directly—much as I noticed suddenly one winter that everyone had started tying scarves by doubling them over and tucking the tails through the loop. Who passed a new law about scarf-tying? In kind, some rogue must have issued a memo, “Psst! Cool writers don’t use quotes in dialogue anymore” to authors as disparate as Junot Díaz, James Frey, Evan S. Connell, J. M. Coetzee, Ward Just, Kent Haruf, Nadine Gordimer, José Saramago, Dale Peck, James Salter, Louis Begley, and William T. Vollmann. Although lately enjoying a vogue, the elision of quotes is not exactly new. Cormac McCarthy has nixed quotes since Suttree (1979), as did E. L. Doctorow in Ragtime back in 1975.