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Ibn Khaldun

The Muslim Thinker Who Inspired Reagan

How Ibn Khaldun influenced the president and a generation of conservative tax policy.
Cover of essays by John Dickinson.

Principled Resistance and the Trouble with Tea

For what did these Americans endure such painful hardship and sacrifice? For what were they taking such a significant stand? Surely, it wasn’t just about tea!
Graph of tax rates on top marginal earned income vs. long term capital gains, 1918-2020.

Why Is Wealth White?

In the 20th century, a moral economy of “whites-only” wealth animated federal policies and programs that created the propertied white middle class.
Joe Biden signing a document
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Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act Exposes Our Allergy to Taxes

The rise of a new tax politics has made it harder to address our problems, and now it threatens democracy, too.
Exhibit

The Way We Tax

From municipal government to international trade, these writings examine the political rhetoric, economic theories, and changing policies of taxation in the U.S.

John D. Rockefeller Jr., right, was the country's biggest taxpayer in 1923, when public disclosure of tax payments was required by law. President Calvin Coolidge, left, pushed Congress to repeal the disclosure law in 1926. This photo was taken in 1925.

Americans’ Taxes Used To Be Public — Until the Rich Revolted

Thanks to the efforts of wealthy taxpayers, the "big reveal" of the 1920s was extremely short-lived.
Collage of photos of Andrew Mellon, Ethel Mars and E.W. Scripps.

The Great Inheritors: How Three Families Shielded Their Fortunes From Taxes for Generations

A century of tax avoidance later, the dynasties created in the 1900s are going strong.

The US Tax Code Should Not Allow Billionaires to Exist

The recent ProPublica exposé shows we need to attack the wealth and power of the rich — and that means massively increasing taxes on them.
A composite photograph of South Carolina's majority-black legislature created and circulated by opponents of Reconstruction

The Austerity Politics of White Supremacy

Since the end of the Confederacy, the cult of the “taxpayer” has provided a socially acceptable veneer for racist attacks on democracy.

Taxing the Superrich

For the sake of justice and democracy, we need a progressive wealth tax.

What Does Tax Policy Have to Do with the Civil Rights Movement?

How congressional conservatives undermined the civil rights movement through the Tax Reform Act of 1969.
Amazon packages on a conveyor belt.
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It's Time For Cities To Stop Giving Tax Breaks To Corporations

To fight back against corporate power, cities have to cooperate, not compete.
Students sit at a graduation ceremony.
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How Tax Policy Made College Unaffordable

The government’s failure to fully invest in higher education created our current crisis.
Man giving a speech for the Taxpayers League of Minnesota.

Half a Century of Anti-tax Orthodoxy Is Wrong

Taxation is at the heart of any serious economic growth policy.

I’m a Depression Historian. The GOP Tax Bill is Straight Out of 1929.

Republicans are again sprinting toward an economic cliff.
original

The Supply-Side Swindle

For decades, the GOP has used tax cuts to achieve its political goals. So why do Dems keep treating "supply-side" as an economic strategy?
Reagan poses for a photo op after with a stack of tax cut legislation in 1981.

I Helped Create the GOP Tax Myth. Trump is Wrong: Tax Cuts Don’t Equal Growth.

The best growth in recent memory came after President Bill Clinton raised taxes in the ’90s.

How Tax Policy Created the 1%

For nearly a century, American tax policy has privileged the investor class and advanced the accumulation of white wealth.

What Did the Three-Fifths Compromise Actually Do?

It was motivated in part by white Southerners' concerns about taxes, but ended up being all about maintaining their political power.
Income tax form

Tax Time

Why we pay.
Alexander Hamilton.

Inventing Alexander Hamilton

The troubling embrace of the founder of American finance.
Donald Trump at a podium

The New Trumpian Bargain

Trump's second term echoes 19th-century policies: tariffs and immigration limits protect workers, while deregulation risks widening inequality.
Home of a Black family living in New Brighton, Pennsylvania, January 1940.

Taxed for Being Black

The long arc of racist plunder through local tax codes is shocking—or, well, maybe it’s not, really.
Hand throwing crumpled dollar bills into pile

Extravagances of Neoliberalism

On how the fringe ideas of a set of American neoliberals became a new and pervasive way of life.
Cover of "The Black Tax"

Tax History Matters: A Q&A with the Author of ‘The Black Tax’

The history of the property tax system and its structural defects that have led to widespread discrimination against Black Americans.
Book cover of Counterrevolution by Melinda Cooper.

A Tax Haven in a Heartless World: On Melinda Cooper’s “Counterrevolution”

Why should taxpayers fund schools that violate their own values, the Moms for Liberty wonder? A new book traces how this kind of thinking about public spending came to be.
Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé.

Slouching Towards Tax Day

How did taxes become something we "do"?
War tax alternate fund information form.

Death and Taxes

The long history and contemporary relevance of war tax resistance.
Ronald Reagan addressing the nation on tax reduction legislation from the Oval Office
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History Explains the Racial Wealth Gap

Ronald Reagan's economic policies exacerbated the racial wealth gap— and they've guided all his successors.
Photo of surgeons performing surgery in a dimly lit operation room.
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For Hospitals, ‘Nonprofit’ Doesn't Mean ‘Charitable’

Medical debt has always been part of the history of nonprofit hospitals.
Protesters and tenants facing displacement hold placards as they attend a rally against private equity-backed firm Greenbrook Partners in Brooklyn, New York on October 15, 2021.

Shared Terrain

The neoliberal order has been exposed as fraudulent, inefficient, and inequitable. Yet it hardly lies in the dustbin of history.

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