Selling Scientific Taxation: The Treasury Department's Campaign for Tax Reform in the 1920s

Murnane, M. Susan

doi:10.1086/430157

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…6 r p .75 Two organizations led the campaign. The first was the American Taxpayers Association, formerly the American Taxpayers' League, an organization founded in 1924 to lobby for income tax cuts on behalf of the rural banking industry (see Chicago Daily Tribune 1939, p. 22;Murnane 2004). By the mid-1930s, the American Taxpayers Association was a general business association that had close ties to the National Association of Manufacturers, the retail industry, and other business associations (New York Times 1941, p. 12, 1942a, p. 1, 1942b, p. 34, 1956Subcommittee No.…”

Section: The Rise and Fall Of The Campaign To Limit Progressive Taxesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Redistributing toward the Rich: Strategic Policy Crafting in the Campaign to Repeal the Sixteenth Amendment, 1938–1958

Martin

2010

American Journal of Sociology

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Beginning in 1938, some American business groups campaigned to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment and limit the federal taxation of income and wealth. Although their proposed upward-redistributive policy would benefit few voters, it won the support of 31 state legislatures. To explain this outcome, this article offers a theory of strategic policy crafting by advocacy groups. Such groups may succeed even in otherwise unfavorable institutional environments if they craft their proposals to fit the salient policy context. Archival evidence and event history analysis support this hypothesis. Public opinion also helps explain legislative support for upward-redistributive policy.

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Section: The Rise and Fall Of The Campaign To Limit Progressive Taxesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Redistributing toward the Rich: Strategic Policy Crafting in the Campaign to Repeal the Sixteenth Amendment, 1938–1958

Martin

2010

American Journal of Sociology

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“…Quotation in Mehrotra (2013: 356). See also Brownlee (1996: 81-106); Leff (1984); Mellon (1924); Murnane (2004); Thorndike (2013). 6.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Leap of Faith

Steinmo¹

2018

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This book examines the evolution of the relationship between taxpayers and their states in Sweden, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Romania, and asks why tax compliance is so much higher in some countries than others. The book shows that successful states have built strong administrative capacities, tax citizens fairly and equitably, and deliver public services that are tangible to taxpayers. The main substantive chapters explore the history of a particular country demonstrating how and why these capacities were developed (or not). The book is part of a larger project entitled “Willing to Pay?” which brings together historical institutional analysis with experimental methods. A series of articles as well as a subsequent book elaborate the specific findings from the experiments undertaken in each country. These experiments, however, cannot tell us why compliance behavior differs so much across societies. The Leap of Faith offers just such an explanation by showing the history of the relationship between taxpayers and their states over time in several countries, allowing an answer to the question: Why are some countries more successful at implementation than others? The book concludes with a policy-oriented chapter written specifically with tax and revenue administrators in the developing world in mind. Drawing on lessons from the historical chapters it is argued that effective administration and equitable distribution of both taxes and public spending are keys to generating taxpayer consent.

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“…While the NTA was marginalizing certain kinds of tax reform, it was spearheading others. Throughout the 1920s, as the U.S. Treasury Department was embarking upon a national campaign to convince ordinary Americans of the virtues of tax cuts amid post-World War I fiscal retrenchment (Murnane 2004), state and especially local governments remained active in raising revenue and providing necessary public goods and services (Wallis 2000).…”

Section: Reforming the General Property Taxmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Programmatic Reform to Social Science Research: The National Tax Association and the Promise and Perils of Disciplinary Encounters

Mehrotra

Thorndike

2011

Law Soc Rev

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This article uses the history of the National Tax Association (NTA), the leading twentieth‐century organization of tax professionals, to strengthen our empirical understanding of the disciplinary encounter between law and the social sciences. Building on existing sociolegal scholarship, this article explores how the NTA embodied tax law's ambivalent historical interaction with public economics. Since its founding in 1907, the NTA has changed dramatically from an eclectic and catholic organization of tax professionals with a high public profile to an insular, scholarly association of mainly academic public finance economists. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative historical evidence, we contend that the transformation in the NTA's mission and output can be explained by the increasing professionalization and specialization of tax knowledge, and by the dominant role that public economics has played in shaping that knowledge. This increasing specialization allowed the NTA to secure its position as a bastion of scholarly tax research. But that achievement came at a cost to the organization's broader civic mission. This article is thus a historical account of how two competing professional disciplines—tax law and public economics—have interacted within a particular organizational field, namely the research and analysis of tax law and policy.

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Selling Scientific Taxation: The Treasury Department's Campaign for Tax Reform in the 1920s

Cited by 4 publications

References 2 publications

Redistributing toward the Rich: Strategic Policy Crafting in the Campaign to Repeal the Sixteenth Amendment, 1938–1958

Redistributing toward the Rich: Strategic Policy Crafting in the Campaign to Repeal the Sixteenth Amendment, 1938–1958

The Leap of Faith

From Programmatic Reform to Social Science Research: The National Tax Association and the Promise and Perils of Disciplinary Encounters

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