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At the turn of the twentieth century, the US system of public finance underwent a dramatic transformation. The late nineteenth-century regime of indirect, hidden, partisan, and regressive taxes was eclipsed in the early twentieth century by a direct, transparent, professionally administered, and progressive tax system. This book uncovers the contested roots and paradoxical consequences of this fundamental shift in American tax law and policy. It argues that the move toward a regime of direct and graduated taxation marked the emergence of a new fiscal polity - a new form of statecraft that was guided not simply by the functional need for greater revenue but by broader social concerns about economic justice, civic identity, bureaucratic capacity, and public power. Between the end of Reconstruction and the onset of the Great Depression, the intellectual, legal, and administrative foundations of the modern fiscal state first took shape. This book explains how and why this new fiscal polity came to be.

Excerpt from Taxation in American States and Cities The present volume is not intended primarily for specialists, but for American citizens generally who are intelligent enough to appreciate the vast importance of the topic with which it deals. It is meant to be a popular work, but, it is hoped, in the better sense of the word. I have endeavored to keep the essential facts in mind, and to avoid all technical details which are not essential to an understanding of the main issues. The work is larger than I thought it would be as it is; and had I written an exhaustive treatise, such as I would have tried to write had my book been designed primarily for lawyers or political economists, it would have been necessary to publish four or five volumes instead of one. The specialist will then understand why much has been omitted which he would gladly have seen inserted. Perhaps the general reader will obtain an idea of the largeness of the subject of taxation in states and cities, when told that the bill itself presented by the Maryland Tax Commission to the legislature covered one hundred and twenty-one printed octavo pages. An adequate explanation of all parts of the bill would have required at least as many additional pages. A study of taxation is calculated to give one a rather pessimistic view of American laws, American institutions, and American character. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.