In December 2017, the Trump administration and its congressional allies enacted the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, hailing it as the twenty-first century successor to the “landmark” Reagan-era Tax Reform Act of 1986. Indeed, the ’86 Act has long been celebrated by scholars and lawmakers alike as...

In recent years, numerous lawmakers, policy analysts, and scholars have been decrying the many defects of the present U.S. income tax system. Few have attempted to defend our return-based mass income tax. This essay reviews Learning to Love Form 1040, Lawrence Zelenak’s stirring and persuasive...

Scholars, policy analysts, and lawmakers have long debated the relationship between steeply progressive taxes and economic prosperity. In their recent book, “Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe” Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage take a step back to...

The First World War was a pivotal event for American political and economic development, particularly in the realm of public finance. For it was during the war years that the federal government ended its traditional reliance on regressive import duties and excise taxes as principal sources of...

A century after it was first published, Charles A. Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution remains a significant and controversial part of constitutional scholarship and history. Just as Beard sought to historicize the Founders as they drafted and adopted the Constitution, this...

At the turn of the twentieth century, the U.S. system of public finance underwent a dramatic, structural transformation. The late nineteenth-century system of indirect taxes, associated mainly with the tariff, was eclipsed in the early decades of the twentieth century by a progressive income...

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the progressive income tax gradually came to dominate the U.S. system of public finance. The move to a direct and progressive tax regime had it roots in the social movements of the time period. This article examines organized labor's attitudes...

This brief essay comments on Mary Lou Fellows recent contribution to the edited volume, Feminist Judgements. It explores Fellows's main contribution to a feminist re-evaluation of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo's opinion in the canonical tax law case, Welch v. Helvering. The essay...