Departments

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tax reform

  • SOURCE: NYT
    12-14-17

    The G.O.P.’s Legislative Lemons

    by Michael Tomasky

    Like the tax bill, nearly all GOP legislation of the past 27 years has been unpopular. Why do they pass it?

  • SOURCE: Dissent Magazine
    4-18-17

    How Tax Policy Created the 1%

    by Julia Ott

    The Revenue Act of 1921 introduced a preferential or reduced tax rate on income from capital gains into the U.S. tax code, in a reversal of how policymakers had thought about different forms of income for several decades.

  • SOURCE: NYT
    4-29-17

    When Congress Made Taxes Fairer

    by Bill Bradley

    With President Trump now talking about overhauling the tax code, it’s worth reflecting on the last time Congress revamped the system: the Tax Reform Act of 1986.

  • SOURCE: NYT
    4-14-13

    Joseph E. Stiglitz: A Tax System Stacked Against the 99 Percent

    Joseph E. Stiglitz is an economist and professor at Columbia University.LEONA HELMSLEY, the hotel chain executive who was convicted of federal tax evasion in 1989, was notorious for, among other things, reportedly having said that “only the little people pay taxes.”As a statement of principle, the quotation may well have earned Mrs. Helmsley, who died in 2007, the title Queen of Mean. But as a prediction about the fairness of American tax policy, Mrs. Helmsley’s remark might actually have been prescient.Today, the deadline for filing individual income-tax returns, is a day when Americans would do well to pause and reflect on our tax system and the society it creates. No one enjoys paying taxes, and yet all but the extreme libertarians agree, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, that taxes are the price we pay for civilized society. But in recent decades, the burden for paying that price has been distributed in increasingly unfair ways....