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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.
by Mustafa Akyol via The Dispatch on October 10, 2024
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!
by Robert Guy via Journal of the American Revolution on February 27, 2024
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.
by Julia Ott via Southern Cultures on January 30, 2023
Joe Biden signing a document
partner

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.
by Molly Michelmore via Made By History on August 19, 2022
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.
by Ronald G. Shafer via Retropolis on April 18, 2022
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.
by Patricia Callahan, James Bandler, Justin Elliot, Doris Burke, Jeff Ernsthausen via ProPublica on December 15, 2021

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.
by Josh Mound via Jacobin on July 20, 2021
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.
by Vanessa Williamson via Dissent on January 11, 2021

Taxing the Superrich

For the sake of justice and democracy, we need a progressive wealth tax.
by Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman via Boston Review on February 3, 2020
People in line to register to vote.

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.
by Evan Faulkenbury via UNC Press Blog on May 13, 2019
Amazon packages on a conveyor belt.
partner

It's Time For Cities To Stop Giving Tax Breaks To Corporations

To fight back against corporate power, cities have to cooperate, not compete.
by Corey Tazzara via Made By History on May 8, 2018
Students sit at a graduation ceremony.
partner

How Tax Policy Made College Unaffordable

The government’s failure to fully invest in higher education created our current crisis.
by Elizabeth Tandy Shermer via Made By History on December 21, 2017
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.
by Felicia Wong via Boston Review on December 15, 2017

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

Republicans are again sprinting toward an economic cliff.
by Robert S. McElvaine via Washington Post on November 30, 2017
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?
by Brent Cebul on November 17, 2017
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.
by Bruce Bartlett via Washington Post on September 28, 2017

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.
by Julia Ott via Dissent on April 18, 2017

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.
by Alex Sayf Cummings via Tropics of Meta on April 17, 2015
Income tax form

Tax Time

Why we pay.
by Jill Lepore via The New Yorker on November 19, 2012
Alexander Hamilton.

Inventing Alexander Hamilton

The troubling embrace of the founder of American finance.
by William Hogeland via Boston Review on November 1, 2007
Donald Trump in a gold hardhat poses with construction workers at the Trump Palace.

How the Capitalism of the 1980s Created Donald Trump’s Theory of the State

The proliferation of privately held companies during the Reagan years laid the foundations for Trump’s approach to government.
by Kim Phillips-Fein via The Nation on October 14, 2025
King George III

The Myth of Mad King George

He was denounced by rebel propagandists as a tyrant and remembered by Americans as a reactionary dolt. Who was he really?
by Rick Atkinson via The Atlantic on October 8, 2025
A large house in a suburb.

How the Government Built the American Dream House

U.S. housing policy claims to promote homeownership. Instead, it encourages high prices, sprawl, and NIMBYism.
by Joseph Lawler via The New Atlantis on August 28, 2025
Vintage illustration of three generations of a 1950s American family, sitting in their living room watching television (screen print), 1950.

How Social Reactionaries Exploit Economic Nostalgia

Conservatives think we need traditional hierarchies to reverse social decline; But it’s the economic equality created by strong unions that Americans miss.
by Meagan Day via Jacobin on May 20, 2025
partner

Tax Season and the Making of the American Fiscal State

As Americans file their taxes this tax season, the Trump administration threatens to unravel the modern fiscal state.
by John Fabian Witt, Ajay K. Mehrotra via Made By History on April 16, 2025
Political cartoon showing a dog named 'income tax' running from a can called "supreme court decisions."

No, President Trump, the Income Tax Wasn’t A Mistake. But It Was an Accident.

Trump claimed that the income tax was passed for “reasons unknown to mankind” and caused the Great Depression. Here’s the real history.
by Jesse Eisinger via ProPublica on April 8, 2025
An aerial view of houses in Jersey City, United States on July 13, 2024.

Is The ‘Predatory’ Property Tax An Instrument Of Oppression?

According to Andrew Kahrl, the property tax has been used to disposs black homeowners since the 19th century.
by Joseph J. Thorndike via Forbes on March 24, 2025
David Rubenstein

King David

Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein has cultivated a reputation as a well-meaning advocate of history education. What does that image mask?
by Rick Perlstein via The American Prospect on December 24, 2024
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.
by Sohrab Ahmari via New Statesman on November 12, 2024
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.
by Victor Ray via Democracy Journal on June 13, 2024
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