Making the modern american fiscal state ebook download
Ajay K Mehrotra is Associate Dean for Research Professor of Law and Louis F Niezer Faculty Fellow at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law He is also an adjunct Professor of History at Indiana University and an Affiliated Faculty member of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis. Making the modern american fiscal state book 2 Although the book can spend too much time on theoretical background general history historographical essays and so forth this is really an impressive overview of the creation and expansion of the income tax in America The basic story is that after the repeal of the Civil War income taxes in 1872 many agrarians labor unions and academic reformers attempted to revive the tax as a means of supplanting both the inequitable tariffs and alcohol taxes at the federal level and existing property taxes at the state and local level Mehrotra identifies three economists Edwin Seligman Henry Carter Adams and Richard Ely as the main instigators all of whom took a Jewish or Christian background into a desire for ethical collectivism Along with some legal theorists such as Thomas Cooley and W. Book making the modern american fiscal state pdf H Burroughs began the gradual move away from a benefits theory of taxes where taxes were seen as incident to the benefits government gave somebody to the ability to pay theory or faculty theory as Seligman called it based on a purely social idea of state action The idea of a graduated income tax divided many theorists Even arch libertarians like William Graham Summer thought the tax should have an exemption for the bare standard of living but others such as Civil War Tax Commissioner David Wells thought rates should be completely uniform. Making the modern american fiscal stateball The Pollack v Farmers Loan and Trust case of 1895 threw many reformers for a loop when it invalidated the 1894 income tax law but they reorganized to pass the corporate excise tax in 1909 and the attached constitutional amendment proposal in the same year When Governor Charles Evan Hughes in New York blocked the state s approval of the amendment in 1910 based on his fears that it could tax and destroy state and municipal bonds advocates reorganized and passed it under the Democratic Dix administration the next year and finally got final approval in February 1913 The taxes exploded to a rate of 77% in World War I but even Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon s post war reforms kept the top rate at 25% far above the pre war rate of 7% At the same time state and local reformers segregated local property taxes from state corporate taxes classified tangible and intangible property in different ways to allow intangible taxing and finally in 1908 got Wisconsin to approve the first state income tax as a means to reduce state reliance of local property taxes This is an important work on a neglected topic one which combines several strands of social economic and legal thinking into a coherent whole English
At the turn of the twentieth century the US system of public finance underwent a dramatic transformation The late nineteenth century regime of indirect hidden partisan and regressive taxes was eclipsed in the early twentieth century by a direct transparent professionally administered and progressive tax system In Making the American Fiscal State Ajay K Mehrotra uncovers the contested roots and paradoxical consequences of this fundamental shift in American tax law and policy He argues that the move toward a regime of direct and graduated taxation marked the emergence of a new fiscal polity a new form of statecraft that was guided not simply by the functional need for greater revenue but by broader social concerns about economic justice civic identity bureaucratic capacity and public power Between the end of Reconstruction and the onset of the Great Depression the intellectual legal and administrative foundations of the modern fiscal state first took shape This book explains how and why this new fiscal polity came to be Making the Modern American Fiscal State Law Politics and the Rise of Progressive Taxation 1877 1929
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