DFIN US Readings in Tax History

Highlights

• Historical Perspective: Sacrifice and Surcharge
  

  “The United States has a tradition of wartime fiscal sacrifice stretching back to the nation's founding. From James Madison to Lyndon Johnson, presidents have asked the American people to foot the bill for national defense. As Franklin Roosevelt declared in 1942, "When so many Americans are contributing all their energies and even their lives to the nation's great task, I am confident that all Americans will be proud to contribute their utmost in taxes."

  
  
  

  ---

  
  
• Historical Perspective: The Windfall Profit Tax -- Career of a Concept
  

  "In the late 1970s, oil prices were expected to increase dramatically once controls disappeared. Regulated prices were pegged as low as $6 per barrel, while global prices had climbed to almost $30. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, lifting the price controls would produce $1 trillion in new revenue for oil producers between 1980 and 1990. Profits were expected to rise by more than $400 billion over the same period."

  
  
  

  ---

  
  
• Edwin R.A. Seligman and the Beginnings of the U.S. Income Tax
  

  "Among the forces that helped forge the modern American fiscal state, none was perhaps more important than the intellectual movement supporting the direct and graduated taxation of income. For that transformation in American public finance was guided by a paradigm shift in the legal and economic theories that undergirded tax policy. By leading the theoretical movement for a permanent, progressive income tax, those theorists became the architects or visionaries of the modern American fiscal state."

  
  
  

  ---

  
  
• What's Old Is New Again: Historical Perspectives on Tax Law & Policy
  

  "At a conference held July 18-19 in Los Angeles, tax scholars gathered to debate a host of familiar topics, including: the nature and direction of fundamental tax reform; the fate of the estate tax; the abuse of the charitable tax exemption and the problem of tax shelters more broadly; the effect of globalization on tax policy; and the difficulty of developing a sustainable tax program for countries struggling to recover from military defeat."

  
  
  

  ---

  
  
• Historical Perspective: What Goes Around, Comes Around
  
  

  "Americans have also, however, been on the receiving end of tax ideas. During the Civil War, British experience with the income tax played a crucial role in shaping the American introduction of a similar levy. And in the late 19th century, German ideas about the income tax sparked vibrant debate among U.S. economists over the reintroduction of that controversial fiscal tool. Several historians, including Oxford scholar Holder Nearing, have reconstructed the influence of that German scholarship on American tax ideas."

  
  
  

  ---

  
  
• Historical Perspective: Ideas in Context
  

  "Consider, for instance, today's ferment around tax reform. Debate among conservatives is substantially more vibrant than anything going on between Republicans and Democrats. Advocates for the Fair Tax and the flat tax are having the sort of passionate argument that once found a home in the fringe journals of the left; we haven't seen this sort of internecine bickering since the Partisan Review took on the New Masses."

  
  
  

  ---

  
  
• All Over Again: The Selling of Tax Legislation
  

  "The specter of tyranny by the majority looms over American democracy, and nowhere more so than in the area of taxation. Since the inception of the income tax, critics have warned of class warfare and of the masses "soaking the rich," thereby shifting most of the burden of paying for government onto a small group of wealthy taxpayers."

  
  
  

  ---

• Andrew Mellon's Unsuccessful Attempt to Repeal Estate Taxes



Prior to 2001, "The last time anyone seriously attempted to repeal the federal estate tax occurred toward the end of the series of tax cuts in the 1920s spearheaded by Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon. Between 1925 and 1928, Mellon attempted unsuccessfully to secure repeal of federal estate taxes. In proposing repeal, Mellon changed Treasury Department policy on estate taxes more than a year into the income tax reform program to reduce marginal taxes on high incomes, popularly known as the Mellon plan for scientific taxation. This article tells the story of the old fight over the federal estate tax, in the hope of illuminating the current one."

---

Regular Features

PEW Research
A Closer Look at Who Does and Doesn't Pay U.S. Income Tax

---

Tax History Museum
A virtual museum of American tax history.

---

Presidential Tax Returns
Copies of the tax returns filed by various American presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush.

---

Taxing Federalism
Selected readings from the Federalist Papers, including every major discussion of the Constitution's power to tax.

---

Taxes During The Great Depression
Tax Policy during the most difficult time in US history. Cartoons

---

Image Gallery
Cartoons, posters, and other images from the history of U.S. taxation.

---

Readings in Tax History
Research, analysis, and commentary on tax history and contemporary tax debates.
This is a very interesting web site. : http://www.taxhistory.org/  

---

---

Copyright 1996
Please Read This Important Copyright Notice
Founded 1996 San Diego, California, USA

GLE@DFIN.COM

PRIVACY POLICY