Do populists know that taxes are wealth transfers?

OPINION:

Earlier this month, a short video from The Washington Post featuring editorial board member Dominic Pino describing the Washington Metro system’s financial woes ignited a social media firestorm.

In the video, Mr. Pino explains that the District of Columbia’s transit system costs more money and serves fewer riders than it did in 2014. He says that similar transit systems around the world do more with less money and that rising labor costs are largely to blame.

Despite the cost increases, Metro has not raised prices to match, which means, as the Post’s X account summarized, “taxpayers who don’t take the train or bus are increasingly subsidizing those who do, and it’s not sustainable.”

That sentence offended hundreds of X users. Many confusingly argued that the drivers-subsidizing-riders dynamic was blindingly obvious and that Pino was stupid — and potentially evil — for pointing it out.

Ryan Evans, the founder of a foreign policy publication, accepted that Metro’s costs were rising but argued that “by tying the entire argument to ‘people who don’t use the metro pay taxes that in part go to running the metro,’ this opinion piece is unrecoverably stupid.”

Why? Because, Mr. Evans says, “All of our taxes support things that not all of us use. That’s part of the social contract.”

In other words, you should not say that because it is obviously true.

Populist writer Sohrab Ahmari felt similarly. He described the post as “one of the dumbest videos ever posted to the internet.” He said, “‘People who don’t drive subsidize road maintenance. Ha-durrrr!’ See how easy that is.”

It is not at all obvious that Metro riders, who pay each time they use the service, are universally aware that their fares do not fully cover the cost of the service. Yet hundreds of X commenters were frustrated by Mr. Pino’s daring to point out that Metro’s rising costs will increasingly be borne by non-riders.

Implicit in many of the comments were fears that Jon Schweppe, author of the “Populist Solutions” Substack, made explicit. “Libertarians want you to live in a godless corporate bordello where private equity makes you pay quintuple the cost for basic public services, while steadily degrading quality,” Mr. Schweppe remarked.

Because Mr. Pino merely questions whether a well-liked government service is delivered effectively, his critics accuse him of being either an ignoramus who denies that the service has any benefits or an evil henchman of big corporations. This absurd logic is typical of the populist thinking many on both the left and the right have embraced.

Instead of discussing costs and benefits, populism seeks to assign moral weight to the issues being discussed and to the people discussing them. Because public transit is used by the general public, it is good, and because Washington Post editorialists are media elites, they are bad.

This populist thinking can be used to justify spending unlimited amounts of money on “good” things from any available source. In contrast, Mr. Pino takes seriously the questions of “how much” and “whose” money is spent on the Metro.

He provides good reasons to think that the service is becoming more costly without becoming more beneficial. Yet even those who acknowledge that the question is one of costs versus benefits just cannot get over the fact that Mr. Pino takes up the “Whose money?” question and describes Metro funding as a transfer of resources from one group to another.

Bloomberg columnist Kriston Capps condescendingly labeled Mr. Pino’s commentary “a 10th grader’s approach to diffuse costs and concentrated benefits,” but he backed up this assertion only by offering a pair of rhetorical questions: “Should just parents pay for schools? Only bill crime victims for police?”

Mr. Capps’ implication that these questions are ridiculous does not make them so. Just as we debate how much should be spent on schools and police, we also debate who should pay, including the blend of federal, state and local funding.

Similarly, it is perfectly legitimate to ask what blend of rider fares and local funds should go to support the Metro.

Populists may not like it, but understanding who funds and who benefits from government programs is a nonnegotiable part of evaluating whether those programs are a good idea.

By declaring it out of bounds to even conceive of policies as transfers of wealth from one group to another, populists wall themselves off from valid criticism and reduce their thought process to: “Is this thing good? If yes, then whatever support we give must be good.”

That is how we get proposals from both parties, such as Republican Rep. Nancy Mace’s “No Tax on Boat Loan Interest” or Democratic New York Assemblyman Keith Power’s proposal for “No Tax on Pet Food.”

Boats and pets are great, but that does not mean those who own them deserve money from those who do not.

Every government spending program comes with a price. Policymakers should be honest about what that price is, and who is paying it, so voters can decide which ideas are worth it and which are not.

• Jace White is the manager of government relations at Advancing American Freedom.