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Federal Taxation in America: A Short History. By W. ELLIOT BROWNLEE, New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. 190. Funding the Modern American State, 1941-1995: The Rise and Fall of the Era of Easy Finance. Edited by W. ELLIOT BROWNLEE, New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. 467.
W. Elliot Brownlee, Professor of History at the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California, has added two important books to the surprisingly short shelf of works on the history of American taxation. The first, although a short history, is a comprehensive one, beginning with the constitutional background to the revenue measures enacted by the first Congress and carrying through to the debates over fundamental tax reform in the mid1990s. Available in paperback, it deserves to be widely used as a supplementary text in public finance courses. The second is a collection of essays related to the evolution of tax and fiscal policy from World War II to the present. Both volumes are products of a project, conducted under the auspices of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, studying the financing of the federal government since World War II.
History is written by authors who not only bring the expertise of particular disciplines to bear, but also express a particular view of the past. Brownlee has appended to his short history an essay on historiography and bibliography that sorts the major writers on American tax history into groups sharing particular points of view, noting that most of these authors are economists, political scientists, or lawyers rather than historians. Reading this essay first is a good way to appreciate the chronological review that comprises the main body of the work. Through World War II, these writers generally, and Sidney Ratner (1942) in particular, reflected a "progressive" view of American tax history as a contest between the search for social justice and the preservation of private gain. In this view, the progressive income tax represented a triumph for social justice. Brownlee categorizes the postprogressive analysts into three groups. First are the"neoconservatives," who see no victory for principled forces of democracy, but rather a tax system made up of special interest provisions put in place by "tax eaters"...