The Great Tax Wars: Lincoln to Wilson - The Fierce Battles over Money and Power That Transformed the Nation

This is a book about six decades of battles over wealth, power and fairness that led to one of the most important progressive achievements in the making of modern America - the establishment of the income tax.

At its core, the story of the origins of the income tax revolves around the rise of the great American fortunes. Picture, if you will, one of the few places that this history can be experienced: the great citadels of wealth of the Gilded Age - the gothic and the beaux arts mansions...the wooded estates, gardens, mirrored ballrooms, libraries and vaulting corridors...fortresses against the great social upheaval that accompanied the accumulation of the vast wealth behind them - the protests, the strikes and demands for justice by farmers, workers and the poor...

The tension between these two forces is at the core of this book's narrative.

[...]

The purpose in this book is to write not so much a history of taxes as a history of how we think about taxes and the way that Americans, from the beginning, sought to strive toward different standards of equity and justice for society and its individual citizens.

-Steven R. Weisman, The Great Tax Wars, pages 1-3

This promises to simultaneously be a very interesting and very angering read.

I'm in the middle of At Dawn We Slept but I only read that during lunchtime on weekdays. I need something active at home to which to turn in case the time is ripe.

Posted by Drizzten at January 09, 2006 01:12 AM