A few weeks ago, I was searching for information about the wealth tax (while writing this post). My Google search for “wealth tax” revealed, as the first link, a paid advertisement to Tom Steyer for President, with the headline “He’ll Tax the Richest 0.1%”. It made me wonder what other candidates feel that taxes are so important to their platform that they were willing to pay to influence public opinion about taxes through Google search ads. What did I find? I found very few examples. Both “Cory Booker tax proposals” and “Cory Booker tax” produced a paid Google ad, but it was a generic Cory Booker ad. “Amy Klobuchar taxes” produced a generic Google ad, as did “Tom Steyer taxes”. All the other searches I executed showed nothing. Joe Biden, Julian Casto, Pete Buttigieg, Bill de Blasio, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Andrew Yang, Beto O’Rourke, and Donald Trump, Bill Weld all showed nothing (although there are certainly a lot of different searches I didn’t perform). These candidates appeared to accept allowing others to shape the narrative around them and their tax proposals. And, those narratives were varied. In my searching, some of the candidates’ own pages came up naturally in the first Google result or two. Others were 100% negative results.
Knowing that Senator Sanders has recently come out with an ambitious new wealth tax plan, I reconducted some of my searchers again this morning. “Bernie taxes”, “sanders taxes” both show nothing. But, “Bernie Sanders taxes” gives a generic Bernie Sanders ad, with no tax content. “Bernie Sanders tax proposal” shows no ads. “Bernie Sanders wealth tax” (the focus of his new ad) also shows no ads.
Why does any of this matter? The tax system is one of the most important way the government interacts with its citizens—it is the way the government funds pretty much everything else it does. As we are selecting who will be the next President, what that person proposes as a tax system is a huge indicator for the type of politics that politician will favor. Buying political ads related to real tax proposals is an indicator (to me, at least) that candidates want to reach out and inform voters who actually wish to know the substance behind what the candidates believe, tax-wise. However, it appears that very few candidates appear to be interested in informing the type of voters that would actually Google around for a specific tax plan.
