In A Good Tax, tax expert Joan Youngman skillfully considers how to improve the operation of the property tax and supply the information that is often missing in public debate. She analyzes the legal, administrative, and political challenges to the property tax in the United States and offers recommendations for its improvement. The book is accessibly written for policy analysts and public officials who are dealing with specific property tax issues and for those concerned with property tax issues in general.

Taxation is a discipline that does not receive sufficient academic attention. It is typically viewed as a subset of law, accounting, public policy, economics, or finance. In this respect, most academic efforts in the field of taxation are shadowed by a mother discipline. There is currently an unprecedented need to approach tax pedagogy in a way that is independent of another discipline. This book caters to that real and unmet need in tax pedagogy. One of the book’s advantages is that it is not tied to a specific tax year and does not coddle the reader with volumes of time-sensitive information. In this book the tax year is never the focus, as the center stage is reserved for teaching the principles and skills necessary to independently find answers. The reader will learn to appreciate the complexity of the American tax system and will be endowed with the contextual understanding necessary to formulate educated opinions about how taxes work and, most importantly, why. Contrary to common belief, taxation in the United States has remained fairly stable for the last 100 years. This book uses the federal individual income tax as a vehicle to unveil the mechanics that make up the American tax system. This book is essential reading for students taking a first course in taxation, at the undergraduate or graduate level, as part of programs in accounting, law, public administration, or business at large.

This brief survey is a comprehensive historical overview of the US federal tax system.

For all the recent attention to the slaveholding of the founding fathers, we still know remarkably little about the influence of slavery on American politics. American Taxation, American Slavery tackles this problem in a new way. Rather than parsing the ideological pronouncements of charismatic slaveholders, it examines the concrete policy decisions that slaveholders and non-slaveholders made in the critical realm of taxation. The result is surprising—that the enduring power of antigovernment rhetoric in the United States stems from the nation’s history of slavery rather than its history of liberty. We are all familiar with the states’ rights arguments of proslavery politicians who wanted to keep the federal government weak and decentralized. But here Robin Einhorn shows the deep, broad, and continuous influence of slavery on this idea in American politics. From the earliest colonial times right up to the Civil War, slaveholding elites feared strong democratic government as a threat to the institution of slavery. American Taxation, American Slavery shows how their heated battles over taxation, the power to tax, and the distribution of tax burdens were rooted not in debates over personal liberty but rather in the rights of slaveholders to hold human beings as property. Along the way, Einhorn exposes the antidemocratic origins of the popular Jeffersonian rhetoric about weak government by showing that governments were actually more democratic—and stronger—where most people were free. A strikingly original look at the role of slavery in the making of the United States, American Taxation, American Slavery will prove essential to anyone interested in the history of American government and politics.