The Great Tax Wars

Author : Steven R. Weisman
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 0743243811
Total Pages : 436 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Great Tax Wars written by Steven R. Weisman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2004-10-26 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major work of history, The Great Tax Wars is the gripping, epic story of six decades of often violent conflict over wealth, power, and fairness that gave America the income tax. It's the story of a tumultuous period of radical change, from Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War through the progressive era under Theodore Roosevelt and ending with Woodrow Wilson and World War I. During these years of upheaval, America was transformed from an agrarian society into a mighty industrial nation, great fortunes were amassed, farmers and workers rebelled, class war was narrowly averted, and America emerged as a global power. The Great Tax Wars features an extraordinary cast of characters, including the men who built the nation's industries and the politicians and reformers who battled them -- from J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie to Lincoln, T.R., Wilson, William Jennings Bryan, and Eugene Debs. From their ferocious battles emerged a more flexible definition of democracy, economic justice, and free enterprise largely framed by a more progressive tax system. In this groundbreaking book, Weisman shows how the ever controversial income tax transformed America and how today's debates about the tax echo those of the past.

Author : Steven R. Weisman
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 419 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Great Tax Wars written by Steven R. Weisman and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the years between the Civil War and World War I as a period of significant change, tracing a rise of wealth and power, the bitter war between the Populists and Progressives, and the birth of America as a global power.

Author : Edmund Wilson
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374600023
Total Pages : 118 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cold War and The Income Tax written by Edmund Wilson and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The truth is that the people of the United States are at the present time dominated and driven by two kinds of officially propagated fear: fear of the Soviet Union and fear of the income tax. These two terrors have been adjusted so as to complement one another and thus to keep the citizen of our free society under the strain of a double pressure from which he finds himself unable to escape -- like the man in the old Western story, who, chased into a narrow ravine by a buffalo, is confronted with a grizzly bear. If we fail to accept the tax, the Russian buffalo will butt and trample us, and if we try to defy the tax, the federal bear will crush us. The 60,000 officials who are appointed to check on us taxpayers are checked on, themselves, it seems, by another group of agents set to watch them. And supplementing these officials -- since private citizens are paid by the Internal Revenue Service to report on other people's delinquencies, and their names of course are never revealed -- there is a whole host of amateur investigators. . . Does this kind of spying and delation differ much in its incitement to treachery from that which is encouraged in the Soviet Union?

Author : Sarah Kreps
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190865326
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Taxing Wars written by Sarah Kreps and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq lasted longer than any others in American history? The conventional wisdom suggests that the move to an all-volunteer force and unmanned technologies such as drones have reduced the apparent burden of war so much that they have allowed these conflicts to continue almost unnoticed for years. Taxing Wars suggests that the burden in blood is just one side of the coin. The way Americans bear the burden in treasure has also changed, and these changes have both eroded accountability and contributed to the phenomenon of perpetual war. Sarah Kreps chronicles the entire history of how America has paid for its wars-and how its methods have changed. Early on, the United States imposed war taxes that both demanded sacrifices from all Americans and served as reminders of their participation. Indeed, thinkers from Immanuel Kant to Adam Smith argued that these reminders were exactly the reason why democracies tended to fight shorter and less costly wars. Bearing these burdens caused the populace to sue for peace when the costs mounted. Leaders in a democracy, responsive to their citizens, would have incentives to heed that opposition and bring wars to as expeditious an end as possible. Since the Korean War, the United States has increasingly moved away from war taxes. Instead, borrowing-and its comparatively less visible connection with the war-has become a permanent feature of contemporary wars. The move serves leaders well because reducing the apparent burden of war has helped mute public opposition and any decision-making constraints. But by masking accountability, however, the move away from war taxes undermines the basis for democratic restraint in wartime. Contemporary wars have become correspondingly longer and costlier as the public has become disconnected from those burdens. Given the trends identified in Taxing Wars, the recent past-epitomized by our lengthy wars in Afghanistan and Iraq-is likely to be prologue.

Author : Steven A. Bank
Publisher : The Urban Insitute
ISBN 13 : 9780877667407
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book War and Taxes written by Steven A. Bank and published by The Urban Insitute. This book was released on 2008 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: This book explores the long history of American taxation during times of war. As political scientist David Mayhew recently observed, since it's founding in 1789, the United States has conducted hot wars for some 38 years, occupied the South militarily for a decade, waged the Cold War for several decades, and staged countless smaller actions against Indian tribes or foreign powers. The cost of these activities has been immense, with important and lasting consequences for the tax system, the economy, and the nation's political structure. By focusing on tax legislation, we hope to identify some of these consequences. But we are not interested in simply recounting statutory details. Rather, we hope to illuminate the politics of war taxation, with a special focus on the influence of arguments concerning "shaped sacrifice" in shaping wartime tax policy. Moreover, we aim to shed light on a less examined aspect of this history by offering a detailed account of wartime opposition to increased taxes.

Author : Fred Harrison
Publisher : Shepheard-Walwyn
ISBN 13 : 0856833150
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ricardo's Law written by Fred Harrison and published by Shepheard-Walwyn. This book was released on 2006-11-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting insights into how income and wealth are produced and distributed, this study analyzes how, despite two centuries of capital accumulation, poverty persists in rich nations. Relying on the theories of David Ricardo—a 19th-century economist credited with developing the theory of rent—a thorough presentation of the history of this economic law, from the inscriptions on the clay tablets of ancient Babylonian merchants to statistics that portray the modern economy, is provided. Presenting readers with conceptual tools that will motivate them to reengage in the democratic process, this examination dispels the myths of contemporary fiscal policy while providing keen insights into the history, and future, of economics.

Author : Roger Lowenstein
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0735223572
Total Pages : 457 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ways and Means written by Roger Lowenstein and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Captivating . . . [Lowenstein] makes what subsequently occurred at Treasury and on Wall Street during the early 1860s seem as enthralling as what transpired on the battlefield or at the White House.” —Harold Holzer, Wall Street Journal “Ways and Means, an account of the Union’s financial policies, examines a subject long overshadowed by military narratives . . . Lowenstein is a lucid stylist, able to explain financial matters to readers who lack specialized knowledge.” —Eric Foner, New York Times Book Review From renowned journalist and master storyteller Roger Lowenstein, a revelatory financial investigation into how Lincoln and his administration used the funding of the Civil War as the catalyst to centralize the government and accomplish the most far-reaching reform in the country’s history Upon his election to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln inherited a country in crisis. Even before the Confederacy’s secession, the United States Treasury had run out of money. The government had no authority to raise taxes, no federal bank, no currency. But amid unprecedented troubles Lincoln saw opportunity—the chance to legislate in the centralizing spirit of the “more perfect union” that had first drawn him to politics. With Lincoln at the helm, the United States would now govern “for” its people: it would enact laws, establish a currency, raise armies, underwrite transportation and higher education, assist farmers, and impose taxes for them. Lincoln believed this agenda would foster the economic opportunity he had always sought for upwardly striving Americans, and which he would seek in particular for enslaved Black Americans. Salmon Chase, Lincoln’s vanquished rival and his new secretary of the Treasury, waged war on the financial front, levying taxes and marketing bonds while desperately battling to contain wartime inflation. And while the Union and Rebel armies fought increasingly savage battles, the Republican-led Congress enacted a blizzard of legislation that made the government, for the first time, a powerful presence in the lives of ordinary Americans. The impact was revolutionary. The activist 37th Congress legislated for homesteads and a transcontinental railroad and involved the federal government in education, agriculture, and eventually immigration policy. It established a progressive income tax and created the greenback—paper money. While the Union became self-sustaining, the South plunged into financial free fall, having failed to leverage its cotton wealth to finance the war. Founded in a crucible of anticentralism, the Confederacy was trapped in a static (and slave-based) agrarian economy without federal taxing power or other means of government financing, save for its overworked printing presses. This led to an epic collapse. Though Confederate troops continued to hold their own, the North’s financial advantage over the South, where citizens increasingly went hungry, proved decisive; the war was won as much (or more) in the respective treasuries as on the battlefields. Roger Lowenstein reveals the largely untold story of how Lincoln used the urgency of the Civil War to transform a union of states into a nation. Through a financial lens, he explores how this second American revolution, led by Lincoln, his cabinet, and a Congress studded with towering statesmen, changed the direction of the country and established a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Author : John V. C. Nye
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691190496
Total Pages : 174 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book War, Wine, and Taxes written by John V. C. Nye and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In War, Wine, and Taxes, John Nye debunks the myth that Britain was a free-trade nation during and after the industrial revolution, by revealing how the British used tariffs—notably on French wine—as a mercantilist tool to politically weaken France and to respond to pressure from local brewers and others. The book reveals that Britain did not transform smoothly from a mercantilist state in the eighteenth century to a bastion of free trade in the late nineteenth. This boldly revisionist account gives the first satisfactory explanation of Britain's transformation from a minor power to the dominant nation in Europe. It also shows how Britain and France negotiated the critical trade treaty of 1860 that opened wide the European markets in the decades before World War I. Going back to the seventeenth century and examining the peculiar history of Anglo-French military and commercial rivalry, Nye helps us understand why the British drink beer not wine, why the Portuguese sold liquor almost exclusively to Britain, and how liberal, eighteenth-century Britain managed to raise taxes at an unprecedented rate—with government revenues growing five times faster than the gross national product. War, Wine, and Taxes stands in stark contrast to standard interpretations of the role tariffs played in the economic development of Britain and France, and sheds valuable new light on the joint role of commercial and fiscal policy in the rise of the modern state.

Author : Robert M. Fogelson
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300205589
Total Pages : 523 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Great Rent Wars written by Robert M. Fogelson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by one of the country's foremost urban historians, "The Great Rent Wars" tells the fascinating but little-known story of the battles between landlords and tenants in the nation's largest city from 1917 through 1929. These conflicts were triggered by the post-war housing shortage, which prompted landlords to raise rents, drove tenants to go on rent strikes, and spurred the state legislature, a conservative body dominated by upstate Republicans, to impose rent control in New York, a radical and unprecedented step that transformed landlord-tenant relations. "The Great Rent Wars" traces the tumultuous history of rent control in New York from its inception to its expiration as it unfolded in New York, Albany, and Washington, D.C. At the heart of this story are such memorable figures as Al Smith, Fiorello H. La Guardia, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, as well as a host of tenants, landlords, judges, and politicians who have long been forgotten. Fogelson also explores the heated debates over landlord-tenant law, housing policy, and other issues that are as controversial today as they were a century ago.

Author :
Publisher : Tolley
ISBN 13 : 9780754554073
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Plucking the Goose written by and published by Tolley. This book was released on 2016 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book features a series of essays and contributions from leading tax figures - including politicians, policy-makers and practitioners - who consider the key factors that have shaped the UK tax code."--Book jacket.