Since the 1970s, economic inequality has soared dramatically across the globe and particularly in the United States. In that time, one of the obstacles of using fiscal policy to address inequality has been the growing myth of the “overtaxed American”—the misguided notion that U.S....

In the early 1920s, legal and economic experts in the U.S. Treasury Department played a pivotal role in developing U.S. fiscal policy. As scholars have shown, the co-evolution of government institutions and scientific expertise has been fundamental to American state building. But this symbiosis...