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[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: This is More Perfect, I’m Jad Abumrad. This season we are bringing you…

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Announcer: 27!]

JAD: 27 of the Most Perfect Album.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Song: I get to ride in this coach, but is he right...

JAD: Hopefully you know the drill by now, but we have put together a series of songs by a whole bunch of different musicians inspired by the amendments to the US Constitution.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Song: Ahhhhhhh.]

JAD: Thus far we have done one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Today we’re gonna keep going nonlinear, we’re gonna leapfrog ahead but also double back. We’ll hear the liner notes first then the songs. These two amendments, alright, enough…

JAD: Are of a very particular breed. You know, in the taxonomy of the 27 amendments, there are the ones that are sort of the big ones, the soaring, principled, freedom of speech, you know, those kind of amendments. And then you have the wonky ones. The procedural ones that are almost like engineering drawings. Like, “Okay, we’ve got this house, it needs a structural fix, so here’s how you do it. You put this thing against thing. You bolt this to that and then maybe it’ll work.” They’re very kind of practical. I actually find those kind of amendments to be the most interesting. Today we have two of those, starting with…

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Announcer: 16th Amendment. Income tax. Tax. Tax.]

SARAH QARI: The 16th Amendment is probably not one of the ones that you know off the top of your head.

JAD: More Perfect producer, Sarah Qari.

SARAH: But.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Song: Taxman!]

SARAH: But if you live in the United States and you’re bringing home a paycheck...

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News: Well it’s that time of year again!]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News: Coming up, tax day.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News: Tax season!]

SARAH: … Is definitely a part of your life.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Announcer: Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states and without regard to any census or enumeration.]

SARAH: You probably also know that…

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 1: Nobody wants to pay taxes.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 2: I don’t like the IRS.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 3: What? What don’t you like about the IRS?]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 2: They take our money.]

SARAH: It’s basically American tradition to complain about paying taxes.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 4: We spent at least 6 billion man-hours...]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 5: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 4: ...Dealing with taxes in the United States.]

SARAH: A 2016 poll showed that Vladimir Putin and OJ Simpson are more popular than the IRS.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News: A new survey finds that Americans would rather clean bathrooms at Chipotle than prepare their taxes, yikes!]

SARAH: So we love to complain about taxes and yet, and here’s the puzzle, if you look at the rate at which we pay them…

JIM HINES: The United States has a really high rate of compliance compared to other countries.]

JAMES ALM: Somewhere between 80 and 85% of all taxes that the IRS estimates should have been paid are actually paid by individuals and corporations.

SARAH: That’s James Alm.

JAMES ALM: Chair of the Department of Economics, Tulane University.

SARAH: And before him, Jim Hines.

JIM HINES: Professor of Economics and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan.

SARAH: What they’re both talking about is sometimes called the compliance rate. How good are we at paying the taxes that we’re supposed to pay? And America scores unusually well.

JAMES ALM: Again, about five out of every six dollars that the IRS believes should be paid in taxes are actually paid in taxes.

SARAH: And both of them told me that this crazy high number has puzzled economists for a really long time. It just shouldn’t be as high as it is. Just to put this in perspective, in recent years, the United States has ranked 7th in the world when it comes to literacy rates, 21st when it comes to the strength of our democracy, and 31st when it comes to life expectancy. But somehow…

JIM HINES: In most international surveys, the United States is among the top three countries in the world in compliance rate with taxes.

SARAH: And economists don’t know how to explain this. They literally call it a tax compliance puzzle. And that puzzle gets even deeper if you look at the number of people that the IRS actually goes after every year.

SARAH: What percentage of people do you think the IRS audits?

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 7: 15?]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 8: 30?]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 9: If I had to take a gander I would have to say like 50%?]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 10: 60%.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 11: About 60%

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 12: I’d say maybe 70%-ish.

SARAH: Okay, okay.

SARAH: Spoiler alert, that’s off by like 69.5%.

SARAH: What if I told you that that number is actually half of a percent.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 12: Damn.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 10: Wow.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 9: A half of a percent?]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 10: Wow.]

SARAH: how do you feel about that?

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 10: I mean, I don’t know what to feel, I just thought it woulda been a lot higher.]

SARAH: For the last several decades, the IRS’s audit rate has been steadily going down.

JAMES ALM: Back in the ‘60s, the overall audit rate was more than 5%.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News: The IRS blames big cuts. Since 2010, the agency’s budget has shrunk by a billion dollars. It also has 17,000 fewer employees.]

SARAH: So really, all signs are pointing towards…

VANESSA WILLIAMSON: Rationally speaking, nobody should pay any taxes. Your chances of getting caught are extremely small. So you should pay zero.

SARAH: That’s Vanessa Williamson, fellow in Govermnet Studies at the Brooking Institution.

VANESSA WILLIAMSON: But that’s not what people do.

SARAH: And the question is why? Why do people pay? Now let’s set aside, for a second, the fact that a lot of taxes get taken out by employers. There are still a lot of cases where people have to voluntarily declare their incomes and they do it. And why? Why do they do it when the chances of getting caught seem so low? One answer could be that they don’t know that the chances are so low and they’re scared. Because the IRS works really hard to make them scared.

JIM HINES: They use the media, frankly, as part of their device for effective tax enforcement. Their message that they want to transmit to people is, “If you don’t comply properly, we’re gonna make you real sorry about it.” They try to get that message across in a lot of different ways. There are high profile prosecutions.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News: Paul Manafort was found guilty on eight counts of financial crimes, mostly tax evasion.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News: Former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, is on trial.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News: Lauren Hill reported to federal prison in Connecticut on Monday.]

JIM HINES: Wesley Snipes.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News: The star of the Blade Trilogy and Passenger 57…]

JIM HINES: Went to prison.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News: ...Was sentenced to three years in prison for failing to file tax returns.]

JIM HINES: But I’m sure it was not lost on the IRS that if you have a famous actor go to prison, that will help, you know, get people’s attention. Leona Helmsley…

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News: The self-appointed Hotel Queen.]

JIM HINES: Somebody from my era, you know, a very wealthy socialite in New York, married to Harry Helmsley, who owned a lot of fancy hotels, she was known in the press as the Queen of Mean. I mean, it was the perfect villainness for the IRS.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News: The Helmsley’s were indicted for not paying their taxes. And while Harry did not have to face charges because of his health, Leona did.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Leona Helmsley: I am not going to jail. I’ve done nothing wrong.]

JIM HINES: They had her arrested on April 14th in an era when half the country did half their taxes on the evening of April 14th.

SARAH: Oh my god!

JIM HINES: So, yeah.

SARAH: So fear, like carefully cultivated fear, might be one piece of the answer here. But it doesn’t seem to me to be the whole story.

SARAH: Hi there! You waiting for somebody to play chess with?

SARAH: Because when I went out to talk to people, I heard a few boogeyman stories for sure. But mainly what I heard was that people felt like the taxes they were paying were going toward something. Everybody had that one thing in their mind that they were thinking of.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 12: Federal programs.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 13: Like food stamps.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 14: Like housing programs, and etc.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 15: Education.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 16: I suppose like public infrastructure.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 17: Everything!]

VANESSA WILLIAMSON: Another part of tax compliance is what’s called tax morale. And that’s wrapped up in our sense, our civic sense, that paying taxes is the right thing to do.

SARAH: Every year, the IRS commissions a study, especially asking people why. Why do they pay? And last year, 95% of those people said it’s every American’s civic duty.

VANESSA WILLIAMSON: And that’s a bipartisan view.

SARAH: That paying taxes is the cost of citizenship.

VANESSA WILLIAMSON: If you pay taxes, you deserve to be represented, right? And so you see that rhetoric in the founding, you see that rhetoric in the Women’s Suffrage Movement, you actually see it in the Civil Rights Movement as well.

SARAH: It’s an idea that’s as old as American democracy itself.

VANESSA WILLIAMSON: You ask people about taxes and they talk to you about politics, right? They talk to you about contributing to the people they see as “us.”

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 17: Pay your taxes, it’s only right.]

VANESSA WILLIAMSON: Contributing to the things that we have to do together as a society.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 18: And if you’re not putting your fair share into it then it’s really not very fair to anybody else who is.]

VANESSA WILLIAMSON: And as evidence that they’re part of the community, and therefore deserve to be represented.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Speaker 19: The system doesn’t work if, you know, you don’t put a little something in to get a little something out. Pay your taxes!]

JIM HINES: And the ex post, you know, 100 years later on the 16th Amendment has gotta be pretty favorable. I mean, try to imagine our world without income taxes. The kind of government that you would have is not the kind of government you have right now.

JAD: That’s Sarah Qari with a liner note for the 16th Amendment. This song on the album comes from a Chicago, Illinois band called Post Animal. Here it is.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Post Animal Song]

JAD: If you want to hear the rest of this song, the rest of any of the songs on the album, go to themostperfectalbum.org. Thank you to Post Animal and all of the bands who contributed. Again, themostperfectalbum.org. I’m Jad Abumrad, this is More Perfect Season 3. We’ll continue with one more amendment after the break.

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JAD: This is More Perfect, Most Perfect Album, Season 3, I’m Jad Abumrad. We just heard a song from Post Album. Before that, liner notes for the 16th Amendment. We’re gonna jump forward now six spots to number 22. Another seemingly wonky one, but actually kinda cool. Kelly Prime brings us the liner notes for this one.

KATIE PRIME: The 22nd Amendment isn’t a big one. Honestly, it’s not even a medium one. After we got our right to speech, our right to bear arms, after we abolished slavery, defined citizenship, and made sure men, women, and people of color all got the right to vote, it kind of feels like a low falls over the Constitution, right? Wrong!

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Song]

KATIE: In 2018, suddenly this unassuming little amendment, number 22, starts getting really interesting.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News: The most dramatic political change in China in decades.]

KATIE: And it all started back in February with news from China.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News: China’s ruling Communist Party proposed Sunday to remove term limits on the office of president.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News: Giving President Xi Jinping the right to remain in office indefinitely.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News: Indefinitely.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News: Indefinitely.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News: To stay in office indefinitely.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News: The almost 3000 delegates had been told the amendments were needed because the challenges China faces require a strong leader and a united party.]

KATIE: So China has had a two term limit on the office of president for over three decades, and this year, under President Xi Jinping, they scrapped it. Not long after, Trump responded.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Donald Trump: Yeah China’s great. And Xi is a great gentleman. He’s now president for life.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Donald Trump: Maybe I’ll want to give that a shot some day.]

GILLIAN METZGER: He suggested it was something we should consider.

KATIE: This is Gillian Metzger.

GILLIAN METZGER: Professor of Law at Columbia Law School.

KATIE: I remember people freaked out. Like it was one of those – I mean for a day, day or two, but you know, there was like…

GILLIAN METZGER: And then they remember the 22nd.

KATIE: Yeah!

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Announcer: 22nd Amendment. Two term limit on presidency. No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice. And no person who has held the office…]

GILLIAN METZGER: And then they remember the 22nd?

KATIE: Yeah! Yeah well I think, what surprised…

KATIE: The 22nd Amendment says no. No presidents for life. Two terms, eight years, max.

KATIE: I wonder if you can tell me, how long have we had the 22nd Amendment?

GILLIAN METZGER: Well we’ve had the 22nd Amendment since 1951.

KATIE: So that means that the two term limit is actually younger than Donald Trump. Is that right?

GILLIAN METZGER: [laughs] I think that’s right.

KATIE: We didn’t have any term limits on the presidency for 163 years. For most of US history, we didn’t need it. But right now, a wind is blowing in America. A kingly wind. And coming in on that wind are a lot of basic questions about what kind of country we want to have. Let me tell you about two other times when that same wind has blown. The first…

KATIE: Okay, let’s go back to the beginning.

KATIE: Was at a time when America was choosing it’s very first president. George Mother[beep] Washington.

DENVER BRUNSMAN: Yes. So George Washington, by the time that he became president, was arguably the most famous person in the western world.

KATIE: This is Denver Brunsman.

DENVER BRUNSMAN: I’m a history professor at George Washington University. We do have to keep in mind that the model of the executive at the time was the monarchy.

KATIE: This was right after the revolution. We had just won a war against Britain for our independence. But as clear as it was what we didn’t want, it was pretty unclear what exactly our presidency should look like.

DENVER BRUNSMAN: Up to that point, I mean, going all the way back to ancient times, you know, people like Caesar and Oliver Cromwell – there was a pattern of strong men leading armies to victory and then staying on.

KATIE: So that was the basic playbook. And then in walks G dubbs.

DENVER BRUNSMAN: He was about 6’ 2” and a half.

KATIE: Tall, athletic. In his younger years, he was handsome. High cheekbones, auburn hair.

DENVER BRUNSMAN: He had a certain way about him that, today, we might almost call aloof. People admired him for being somewhat above others.

KATIE: In other words, this guy walked, talked, and glowed like a king. And Americans, kind of default, started treating him like one. The guys at the Constitutional Convention, they gave him the power of the veto, the power to declare war, the power to pardon, and term limits? Psh. No way.

DENVER BRUNSMAN: If anything, I think there was more of a sense, as Hamilton had argued at the convention, that that should be a lifetime office.

KATIE: So George Washington gets elected. He spends one year, two years, four years, suddenly, eight years in office. And a lot of people that he would just keep serving till he died. But George Washington kind of struggled with that question. Like on the one hand, America is a democracy, and in a democracy, we go with what we the people want. Seemingly, what we the people wanted was for him to stay on. On the other hand, he’s just one guy with flaws.

DENVER BRUNSMAN: Yeah, so Washington resisted the office of the king in different ways. And he wrote a great letter to an English historian. A woman named Catherine Macaulay Graham. And Washington remarked to her that, “I walk on un-trodden ground.” Basically that, “Everything I do is a precedent.”

KATIE: Should he stay or should he go? He had a sense that however he answered that question, it was going to reverberate forward in time.

KATIE: And so, in the wee hours of the morning, September 19th, 1796. George Washington publishes his farewell address.

DENVER BRUNSMAN: He had it published in a Philadelphia newspaper. And he rode back to Mt. Vernon.

KATIE: Back to Virginia.

DENVER BRUNSMAN: On the exact same day. I imagine him riding back to Mt. Vernon and seeing people picking up the newspaper that day.

KATIE: “It appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now appraise you of the resolution I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made.”

DENVER BRUNSMAN: If something went viral in the 18th century, this was it. Originally just one newspaper had the farewell address. It was called the American Daily Advertiser. But very soon it got reprinted in many other newspapers.

KATIE: It’s almost hard to overstate how surprising this would be. Because in all of western history, it had almost never happened before that someone willingly gave up their power. Washington would die three years later.

DENVER BRUNSMAN: He would have died in the middle of his third term and so the message, I think, would have been clear. That this was potentially an office for life.

KATIE: The way I like to imagine it is by stepping down, George Washington just barely avoids getting swept away in this kingly wind that had been blowing through the country, and with that one action, he forestalls a fate that stays suspended above us for 136 years. Until…

KATIE: Was there a president, like a president in particular who changed that?

GILLIAN METZGER: FDR.

KATIE: It’s 1932.

GILLIAN METZGER: And the nation is in desperate economic shape.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News: On October 24th, there was a massive wave of selling. On October 29th, Black Tuesday, the bottom dropped out and the market crashed.]

KATIE: It’s the Great Depression.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News: Jobs, savings and homes were wiped out.]

KATIE: Thousands and thousands of banks started failing. Farmers went bankrupt. Americans were literally starving. But then…

KATIE: Franklin Delano Roosevelt rolls in and he instantly takes charge.

FRANCIS BUCKLEY: He had an incredible command over the media.

KATIE: Francis Buckley, professor at George Mason University.

FRANCIS BUCKLEY: His fireside chats

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, News Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States.]

FRANCIS BUCKLEY: We didn’t have television.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, FDR: My friends, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking.]

FRANCIS BUCKLEY: But he had this incredible ability to communicate directly with the American people through the radio.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, FDR: I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, and why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be.]

KATIE: By speaking directly to the nation during its darkest time…

FRANCIS BUCKLEY: He conveyed the sense that we were strong enough to get out of the depression.

KATIE: He calmed our fears, and in exchange, congress, the American people, gave him unprecedented power. He transformed the federal government, took control of the economy, established huge new social welfare programs, and Americans elected FDR for four consecutive terms as president. And then, in 1945, in the middle of his fourth term, he dies. And you could say at the this point, the country wakes up from a collective dream. The depression has largely past. We’d weathered Pearl Harbor, most of World War 2. And suddenly, we’re at war with ourselves. Fighting about how much power a president should have.

FRANCIS BUCKLEY: War time is one thing, but for God’s sakes, let’s return to the convention and let’s make it a constitutional amendment.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Announcer: 22nd Amendment. No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice. And no person who has held the office of president, or acted as president for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected president, shall be elected to the office of president more than once.

KATIE: Two terms, you’re out.

GILLIAN METZGER: Right. Right, exactly.

KATIE: On one hand, it does seem kind of undemocratic in some ways. If the American people continue to say, “Yes, we want that person.” And there’s an election every four years that we respect the result of, it seems a little bit undemocratic to me that we would be limited as American people.

GILLIAN METZGER: I think you’re right.

KATIE: That’s Gillian Metzger again.

GILLIAN METZGER: I mean – look, a president only stays on repeatedly if the president’s reelected, right? So I think there is a strong democratic argument of a president who’s able to get reelected and able to generate popular support, the democratic answer would be to let the people elect that president.

KATIE: On the other hand, Gillian says, the presidency these days is so powerful that once a president gets in office, they can bully out the competition. They have access to all these resources, a giant megaphone.

GILLIAN METZGER: I think we have to acknowledge that there are a lot of factors that sort of limit the extent to which the result of our presidential elections are a reflection of a popular will, pure and simple.

KATIE: So yeah, the 22nd Amendment might be undemocratic. It does tie our hands. But at the same time, maybe that’s a good thing. I mean, take as an analogy the story of Ulysses.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Ulysses Film: Look there! The rocks of the sirens!]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Ulysses Film: No man worth his salt…]

KATIE: In that story, Ulysses and his men have to sail past the sirens. And sirens sing these beautiful songs that sailors to their deaths. So Ulysses knows he’s not going to be able to resist the song, so he tells his men...

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Ulysses Film: Tie me to the mast.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Ulysses Film: Whatever my mouth speaks, whatever orders I may give, do not obey them.]

KATIE: Tie me up, I’m not gonna be able to resist, just tie me up.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Ulysses Film: Tie me to the mast!]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Ulysses Film: Alright, if that’s what you want.]

KATIE: And then we’ll go past the sirens because I can’t trust myself in the moment to make the right decision. Perhaps the 22nd Amendment is a little like that rope that Ulysses uses to bind his hands so that he doesn’t waver.

GILLIAN METZGER: In other words, it’s a prophylactic measure, right? There will be times when it will cost us a good president we might want to keep. But it’s a prophylactic measure to not let ourselves really entertain those thoughts, go down that road.

KATIE: It’s one small way we’ve chosen to protect ourselves from that siren song. Those kingly winds.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Donald Trump: President for life.]

KATIE: That sometimes blow.

JAD: That was producer Kelly Prime with liner notes for the 22nd Amendment! And on the album covering the 22nd is a Brooklyn band called Pavo Pavo. They wrote a sort of crooning indie pop ballad from the perspective of a departing president. Here’s an excerpt.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Pavo Pavo Song]

JAD: More Perfect is produced by me, Jad Abumrad, Suzie Lechtenberg, Julia Longoria, Kelly Prime, Sarah Qari and Alex Overington. With help from Elie Mystal, Michelle Harris, and David Gebel. Thanks to Nora Keller for her help making on our record 27 The Most Perfect Album. And thank you to Jeffrey Wright for reading the amendments. You can listen to all the songs and read short and funny essays about the amendments at themostperfectalbum.org. I’m Jad Abumrad. Thanks for listening.

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