New Books In Public Policy

Prior to the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, the United States did not have a national system of taxation–it had a regional system, a system linked to political parties, and a system that, in many instances, preserved and protected trade.  In his superbly written and thoughtful book Making the Modern American Fiscal State (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Ajay K. Mehrotra argues that “the rise of direct and graduated taxation in the early twentieth century signaled the start of a more complex and sophisticated system of fiscal governance.” Indeed, the introduction of a federal income did not merely create a completely new and soon dominate stream of revenue for the federal government, but created new institutions for the collection, accounting and distribution of revenue, and, most importantly, changed the way Americans viewed and related to each other. Drawing fascinating portraits of economists and legal scholars and pulling together intellectual threads from economics, institutional and political his