The Politics And Development Of The Federal Income Tax

Taxes are an inescapable part of life. They are perhaps the most economically consequential aspect of the relationship between individuals and their government. Understanding tax development and implementation, not to mention the political forces involved, is critical to fully appreciating and critiquing that relationship. Tax Politics and Policy offers a comprehensive survey of taxation in the United States. It explores competing theories of taxation’s role in civil society; investigates the evolution and impact of taxes on income, consumption, and assets; and highlights the role of interest groups in tax policy. This is the first book to include a separate look at "sin" taxes on tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and sugar. The book concludes with a look at tax reform ideas, both old and new. This book is written for a broad audience—from upper-level undergraduates to graduate students in public policy, public administration, political science, economics, and related fields—and anyone else that has ever paid taxes.

A journalist, educator, and lawyer specializing in tax and government issues discusses the issues political leaders face when developing and implementing state tax policy, particularly basic state tax concepts, the political and theoretical issues involved, and the major policy issues facing state governments. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Was Canada’s Dominion experiment of 1867 an experiment in political domination? Looking to taxes provides the answer: they are a privileged measure of both political agency and political domination. To pay one’s taxes was the sine qua non of entry into political life, but taxes are also the point of politics, which is always about the control of wealth. Modern states have everywhere been born of tax revolts, and Canada was no exception. Heaman shows that the competing claims of the propertied versus the people are hardwired constituents of Canadian political history. Tax debates in early Canada were philosophically charged, politically consequential dialogues about the relationship between wealth and poverty. Extensive archival research, from private papers, commissions, the press, and all levels of government, serves to identify a rising popular challenge to the patrician politics that were entrenched in the Constitutional Act of 1867 under the credo “Peace, Order, and good Government.” Canadians wrote themselves a new constitution in 1867 because they needed a new tax deal, one that reflected the changing balance of regional, racial, and religious political accommodations. In the fifty years that followed, politics became social politics and a liberal state became a modern administrative one. But emerging conceptions of fiscal fairness met with intense resistance from conservative statesmen, culminating in 1917 in a progressive income tax and the bitterest election in Canadian history. Tax, Order, and Good Government tells the story of Confederation without exceptionalism or misplaced sentimentality and, in so doing, reads Canadian history as a lesson in how the state works. Tax, Order, and Good Government follows the money and returns taxation to where it belongs: at the heart of Canada’s political, economic, and social history.

Study on fiscal relations in Canada by various authors. Including: "Federal-provincial transfers in Canada: a critical review of the existing arrangements" by Robin Boadway; "Equitable fiscal federalism: the problems in respect of resources revenue sharing" by Peter A. Cumming; "The harmonization of social policy" by Claude E. Forget and "Taxation policy and the Canadian Economic Union" by Anthony F. Sheppard.

The redistributive state is fading in Canada. Government programs are no longer offsetting the growth in inequality generated by the market. In this book, leading political scientists, sociologists, and economists point to the failure of public policy to contain surging income inequality. A complex mix of forces has reshaped the politics of social policy, including global economic pressures, ideological change, shifts in the influence of business and labour, changes in the party system, and the decline of equality-seeking civil society organizations. This volume demonstrates that action and inaction policy change and policy drift are at the heart of growing inequality in Canada.

State legislators are constantly making tradeoffs between changing taxes and providing public services. Not only must they reconcile their own policy preferences with the preferences of their constituents, but they must consider the impact of actions taken by both the federal government and competing states. Glenn Beamer uses a series of in-depth case studies in eleven states to show how legislators made decisions dealing with taxation, economic development, education financing, and Medicaid. Beamer identifies six factors that influence legislators' decisions: accountability, dependability, equity, obscurability, and horizontal and vertical transferability. Within the context created by citizen demands, intergovernmental politics, policy histories, court interventions, and state constitutions, this study analyzes how legislators employ these principles to develop and enact policies. In addition to modeling state politics within the context of federalism, Creative Politics, reflecting the author's extensive interviews with legislators, is novel in its focus on politicians' views about public services, the strategies to finance them, and efforts to develop and maintain political support for them. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, economics, and public administration, and, more specifically, of federalism, state politics and policy, and legislative decision-making. Glenn Beamer is Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research, University of California, Berkeley, and Assistant Professor of Government, University of Virginia.

Marginal income tax rates in advanced industrial countries have fallen dramatically since the mid-1980s, but levels and progressivity of income taxation continue to differ strongly across countries. This study offers a new perspective on both observations. It blends theoretical inquiry with focused quantitative analysis and in-depth investigation of seven countries: Germany, Australia and New Zealand as well as Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. The Politics of Income Taxation highlights the equity-efficiency tradeoffs that structure the politics of income taxation, and analyses how income taxes are embedded in broader tax systems. It explains the limited but enduring importance of political parties and democratic institutions. Finally, the study paints a nuanced picture of the role of globalisation and thus sheds light on the pros and cons of tax coordination at European and international levels.