War Taxation

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.

"War Taxation: Some Comments and Letters" is a book by the renowned German born, American investment banker Otto Heinrich Kahn. Written during the First World War, Kahn examines American policy on taxation and opines that then new measures to raise taxes for funding the war effort, particularly on the wealthy are not well thought out. He warns that this would precipitate a situation of capital outflow to nations such as Canada with lower tax rates. Kahn also addresses the widespread speculation that "appears to prevail amongst not a few people the strange delusion that America's entrance into the war (First World War) was fomented by moneyed men, in part, at least, from the motive and for the purpose of gain."

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.

Excerpt from War Taxation: Some Comments and Letters The recent publication of a little pamphlet entitled "Some Comments on War Taxation" elicited numerous interesting comments by the readers. The points to which these comments mainly related were the statements contained in the pamphlet that: First. If our neighbor Canada continues her present policy of not taxing incomes, or if she imposes only a moderate tax while rates of income taxation in America are fixed at oppressively and unnecessarily high rates, there can be little question that the ultimate result will be an outflow of capital to Canada, and that men of enterprise will seek that country. Second. Moneyed men not having their capital engaged in active business, if they are so constituted that their consciences permit them to evade their share of monetary sacrifice, can put their funds into tax-exempt securities. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.