We analyze the distributive justice of the combined burden of income taxes, social security taxes and public transfers on employee households in the United States on the federal level and in six member states. To investigate whether the treatment of families by the aggregate tax and transfer...

The topic of measuring the growth and size of government, on which there is now a robust literature and policy debate, held little interest for economists in the 18th and 19th centuries and throughout much of the 20th century. Although it is a bit dangerous to date when perceptions of the...