Bernard Hibbitts is a tough act to follow, and I doubt I’ll
be nearly as prolific or as inspiring as he was in his posts, but I hope to use
my time here to share some background on my research and teaching, and to revisit
(perhaps later this month) some of the pressing issues facing legal historians
and historians more generally during this tumultuous time in higher
education.
Let me start, though, with a brief post about my recently
published book, Making the Modern
American Fiscal State: Law, Politics and the Rise of Progressive Taxation,
1877-1929.
Dan has already kindly posted a summary of the book and
links to the introduction and conclusion. And Chris Schmidt has generously
reviewed the book on JOTWELL. I thought
I’d begin by following up on a couple of the book’s central themes.
One of my primary aims in this project is to place the
origins of our progressive income tax into a broader historical context. Today, scholars and social commentators are
highly critical of our current tax regime.
Many political conservatives depict it as an inefficient set of complex
rules that ought to be abandoned in favor of some kind of consumption tax. By contrast, many liberals believe our
present system is mainly a muddle of incoherent, special interest giveaways and
loopholes for the wealthy that does little to address economic inequality. Many of the historical narratives we have
seem to track one of these two views.
Although there’s a certain amount of truth to both of these depictions,
they seemed to me rather simplistic and ahistorical accounts. Thus, I try to show how the reformers and
lawmakers that helped create the early twentieth century foundations of our
current system were motivated by a complex mix of intentions. In supporting a progressive income tax, most
activists were not trying to radically redistribute wealth, as some commentators
on the political right might claim today.
Rather, their goal was to reallocate the burden of financing a burgeoning
modern, industrial state. They wanted to
replace the existing nineteenth-century regime of indirect, regressive, and
hidden taxes – associated mainly with the tariff and excise taxes on alcohol
and tobacco – with a direct, graduated, and transparent tax system.
Similarly, while the adoption of moderately graduated income
taxes may not have gone as far as some radical dissidents had hoped in
addressing the massive inequalities of the first Gilded Age, the effective
displacement of a regressive and hidden tax system was in and of itself a
tremendous achievement. In short, I try
to demonstrate how reformers and lawmakers navigated between the political
extremes in an effort to create a new fiscal order.
The book’s other goal is to show how taxation a century ago
was about much more than just raising revenue in a fair and effective
manner. It was also about reinvigorating
a new sense of American civic identity. Influential
thinkers, populist activists, and political leaders believed that citizens owed
a debt to society in relation to their “ability to pay.” They used these key words as a cognitive map,
as a type of mental frame, to illustrate the widening circle of modern
associational duties and social obligations.
They also used this curt yet crucial phrase – “ability to pay” – as a
political tool. They wielded these words to demonstrate that citizens that had
greater economic power also had a greater social responsibility to contribute
to the public good – to contribute not only proportionally more but
progressively more. In this sense,
demands for progressive taxation were used to reconfigure the relationship
between citizens and the state, to renegotiate a new social contract, to forge
a new sense of fiscal citizenship.
In the book’s conclusion, I try to show how these Progressive-Era
claims continue to resonate today. The
calls to tax Warren Buffet as much as his secretary, the demands by the “99
percent” to “tax the rich,” and even the Obama administration’s partial victory
last year in raising the top tax rates on the wealthiest Americans are all
examples of the enduring legacy of a progressive tax system based on the notion
of “ability to pay.”
In my next post, I hope to discuss briefly how I became
interested in trying to write a socio-legal history of the modern American
fiscal state, and the origins of my broader research interests in the historical
relationship between taxation and state-building.
