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Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress, and the State, 1945-1975. By Julian E. Zelizer. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xv + 384 pp. Notes, references, and index. Cloth, $49.95. ISBN 0521621666.
Reviewed by W Elliot Brownlee
Between World War II and the late 1970s, a system of easy finance funded the federal government. The mass-based income tax introduced during the war and the phenomenal economic growth of the next thirty years made the tax system capable of producing buoyant revenues. The powerful tax-writing committees in Congress maintained the system and shaped its details, determining winners and losers from changes in the tax code, generating political benefits for those in power, and stabilizing (or destabilizing) the economy. Perhaps the most important committee leader was Wilbur D. Mills, the Democrat from Arkansas who chaired the House Ways and Means Committee between 1958 and 1974.
Julian Zelizer has taken advantage of the perspectives that time and the archives provide. He has written a brilliant reassessment of Mills. He lifts Mills from the pluralist, weak-state interpretation that has portrayed him as a Congressional baron who represented local, Southern interests and engaged in a power-hungry conflict with presidents that often resulted in policy gridlock. Mills emerges from this revisionist history as an agent of state autonomy, principled reform, and significant accomplishment. His commitment to political learning enabled him to become a master of consensus-building inside and outside of Congress, act as a broker between tax experts and the...