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The Great Tax Wars. By STEVEN R. WEISMAN. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002 Pp. 419.
Taxes have always been near and dear to the heart of American politics. The Great Tax Wars focuses on tax politics of the period from Lincoln's administration through Wilson's. With the possibility of a new round of national debate looming on the comparative merits of a consumption-based tax and the income tax, a review of past debates can be helpful in the following three ways. First, the debates of the past help us understand how we arrived at our current hybrid tax system, a mixture of provisions consistent with progressive income taxation and others consistent with consumption-based taxation. Second, those debates reveal interesting perceptual differences between the participants and modern understandings of the issues on the part of tax professionals. Awareness of these differences can help the tax professional anticipate misunderstandings on the part of politicians and the public. Finally, reviewing past debates over tax policy is fun. The rhetoric seems more colorful, arguments more duplicitous, and motives more obscure than during recent controversies.
Steven Weisman, the author of this work, describes himself as a "political reporter, not a historian." One should add that he also is not a tax lawyer, economist or practitioner. Bringing the craft of a New York Times reporter to bear on the topic is what gives this book its strength. Weisman's reporter's eye looks for the human interest dimension of the story and his ear sorts through the prosaic to hear the profound or the provocative. His personality sketches of the politicians, judges, and business leaders are insightful. The book's weaknesses come from the lack of the historian's attention to accurate detail, the lawyer's interest in defining terms, the economist's theoretical framework including analysis of tax incidence, or the practitioner's concerns about tax administration.
The stories Weisman retells begin with adopting an income tax to help the Union finance the Civil War. He views this as a successful, populist effort to tax the rich and as a shift away from consumption taxes. Tariffs dominated pre-Civil War federal revenues and were raised substantially during the war. But the discussion of the magnitude of the Civil War income tax (p. 101) is all confused. Weisman maintains...