The Rich Are Pushing Right-Wing Tax Education in Schools
The Tax Foundation’s TaxEDU curriculum teaches students that corporate tax cuts help workers. With backing from the Koch network and big oil, the right-wing nonprofit is implanting this agenda in public schools.
A teacher passes out a mock calculus test during a class at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics on Thursday, May 2, 2019. (Derek Davis / Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)
When students head back to school in the fall, some will get an unusual crash course in taxes and personal finance. In class lessons and explainer videos, they’ll be taught that workers are the ones “who bear the burden” of corporate income taxes, and that when big companies dodge taxes, it helps “protect employment and job creation.”
Through a new curriculum project called TaxEDU, corporations are pushing these pro-business messages in hundreds of high school and college classrooms across the country. The effort is being led by the Tax Foundation, a right-wing tax policy nonprofit that also helped shape Project 2025, the nine-hundred-page plan for a second Donald Trump presidency to dismantle the federal government.
As states have considered new policies like “mansion taxes” to levy on the wealthy and the IRS is beefing up its infrastructure and enforcement, TaxEDU has been expanding its reach, instructing more and more students that the last thing they want to do is make sure the rich and powerful pay their fair share.
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