The Income Tax and the Progressive Era

The Income Tax and the Progressive Era PDF Author: John D. Buenker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429954794
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 514

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book, first published in 1985, investigates the enactment of the federal income tax as a case study of an important Progressive Era reform. It was a critical issue that likely divided people along socioeconomic lines, thus helping to provide insight into the debate over the ‘class origins’ of the reformist movement.

The Income Tax and the Progressive Era

The Income Tax and the Progressive Era PDF Author: John D. Buenker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429954794
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 514

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book, first published in 1985, investigates the enactment of the federal income tax as a case study of an important Progressive Era reform. It was a critical issue that likely divided people along socioeconomic lines, thus helping to provide insight into the debate over the ‘class origins’ of the reformist movement.

Taxation in the Early Progressive Era

Taxation in the Early Progressive Era PDF Author: Marianne Johnson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This paper examines the views of three prominent Wisconsin progressives - Richard T. Ely, Tomas Sewall Adams, and John R. Commons - on taxes as social policy. Wisconsin emerged as a national progressive leader in the 1890s - a 'laboratory of democracy' that produced the nation's first minimum wage, first unemployment insurance plan, the first civil service law, and the first state-level income tax. Yet, despite often bordering on the radical, Wisconsin economists were cautious about demands for income and wealth redistribution through the tax mechanism. Instead, they conceived of taxation as an instrument of social policy via three intersecting paths: (1) that the provision of government services could serve as a vehicle by which to achieve desirable socioeconomic outcomes, (2) that properly designed tax policy could improve morality, itself a worthy end, and (3) that inequality and distributional concerns be reconceived as issues of power rather than of wealth.

Envisioning the Modern American Fiscal State

Envisioning the Modern American Fiscal State PDF Author: Ajay K. Mehrotra
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
At the turn of the twentieth century, the U.S. system of public finance underwent a dramatic, structural transformation. The late nineteenth-century system of indirect taxes, associated mainly with the tariff, was eclipsed in the early decades of the twentieth century by a progressive income tax. This shift in U.S. tax policy marked the emergence of a new fiscal polity - one that was guided not simply by the functional and structural need for government revenue but by concerns for equity and economic and social justice. This Article explores the paradigm shift in legal and economic theories that undergirded this dramatic shift in U.S. tax policy. More specifically, this Article contends that a particular group of academic economists played a pivotal role in supplanting the benefits theory of taxation, and its concomitant vision of the state as a passive protector of private property, with a more equitable principle of taxation based on one's ability to pay - a principle that promoted a more active role for the state in the distribution of fiscal burdens. In facilitating this structural transformation, these theorists were able to use the growing concentration of wealth and the ascendancy of new economic ideas as justifications for using a progressive income tax to reallocate the burdens of financing the burgeoning American regulatory, administrative, and welfare state.

Making the Modern American Fiscal State

Making the Modern American Fiscal State PDF Author: Ajay K. Mehrotra
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107043921
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 447

Get Book Here

Book Description
Making the Modern American Fiscal State chronicles the rise of the US system of direct and progressive taxation.

The Progressive Movement and the Graduated Income Tax, 1913-1919

The Progressive Movement and the Graduated Income Tax, 1913-1919 PDF Author: John Wylie Hillje
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Income tax
Languages : en
Pages : 780

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Progressive Era

The Progressive Era PDF Author: Murray N. Rothbard
Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute
ISBN: 1610166779
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 761

Get Book Here

Book Description
Rothbard's posthumous masterpiece is the definitive book on the Progressives. It will soon be the must read study of this dreadful time in our past. — From the Foreword by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano The current relationship between the modern state and the economy has its roots in the Progressive Era. — From the Introduction by Patrick Newman Progressivism brought the triumph of institutionalized racism, the disfranchising of blacks in the South, the cutting off of immigration, the building up of trade unions by the federal government into a tripartite big government, big business, big unions alliance, the glorifying of military virtues and conscription, and a drive for American expansion abroad. In short, the Progressive Era ushered the modern American politico-economic system into being. — From the Preface by Murray N. Rothbard

The Price of Progress

The Price of Progress PDF Author: R. Rudy Higgens-Evenson
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801875897
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 181

Get Book Here

Book Description
Between the Civil War and the Great Depression, twin revolutions swept through American business and government. In business, large corporations came to dominate entire sectors and markets. In government, new services and agencies, especially at the city and state levels, sprang up to ameliorate a broad spectrum of social problems. In The Price of Progress, R. Rudy Higgens-Evenson offers a fresh analysis of therelationship between those two revolutions. Using previously unexploited data from the annual reports of state treasurers and comptrollers, he provides a detailed, empirical assessment of the goods and services provided to citizens, as well as the resources extracted from them, by state governments during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.Focusing on New York, Massachusetts, California, and Kansas, but including data on 13 other states, his comparative study suggests that the "corporate state" originated in tax policies designed to finance new and innovative government services. Business and government grew together in a surprising and complex fashion. In the late nineteenth century, services such as mental health care for the needy and free elementary education for all children created new strains on the states' old property tax systems. In order to pay for newly constructed state asylums and schools, states experimented for the first time with corporate taxation as a source of revenue, linking state revenues to the profitability of industries such as railroads and utilities. To control their tax bills, big businessesintensified lobbying efforts in state legislatures, captured important positions in state tax bureaus, and sponsored a variety of government-efficiency reform organizations. The unintended result of corporate taxation—imposed to allow states to fulfill their responsibilities to their citizens—was the creation of increasingly intimate ties between politicians, bureaucrats, corporate leaders, and progressive citizens. By the 1920s, a variety of "corporate states" had proliferated across the nation, each shaped by a particular mix of taxation and public services, each offering a case study in how the business of America, as President Calvin Coolidge put it, became business.

The Great Tax Wars

The Great Tax Wars PDF Author: Steven R. Weisman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743243811
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Progressivism and Economic Growth

Progressivism and Economic Growth PDF Author: W. Elliot Brownlee
Publisher: Kennikat Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Get Book Here

Book Description


Illiberal Reformers

Illiberal Reformers PDF Author: Thomas C. Leonard
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691175861
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity, journalism, and law, played a pivotal role in establishing minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, workmen's compensation, progressive income taxes, antitrust regulation, and other hallmarks of the regulatory welfare state. But even as they offered uplift to some, economic progressives advocated exclusion for others, and did both in the name of progress. Leonard meticulously reconstructs the influence of Darwinism, racial science, and eugenics on scholars and activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing a reform community deeply ambivalent about America's poor. Economic progressives championed labor legislation because it would lift up the deserving poor while excluding immigrants, African Americans, women, and 'mental defectives, ' whom they vilified as low-wage threats to the American workingman and to Anglo-Saxon race integrity. Economic progressives rejected property and contract rights as illegitimate barriers to needed reforms. But their disregard for civil liberties extended much further. Illiberal Reformers shows that the intellectual champions of the regulatory welfare state proposed using it not to help those they portrayed as hereditary inferiors, but to exclude them. -- Provided by publisher.