An engaging and enlightening account of taxation told through lively, dramatic, and sometimes ludicrous stories drawn from around the world and across the ages
Governments have always struggled to tax in ways that are effective and tolerably fair. Sometimes they fail grotesquely, as when, in 1898, the British ignited a rebellion in Sierra Leone by imposing a tax on huts—and, in repressing it, ended up burning the very huts they intended to tax. Sometimes they succeed astonishingly, as when, in eighteenth-century Britain, a cut in the tax on tea massively increased revenue. In this entertaining book, two leading authorities on taxation, Michael Keen and Joel Slemrod, provide a fascinating and informative tour through these and many other episodes in tax history, both preposterous and dramatic—from the plundering described by Herodotus and an Incan tax payable in lice to the (misremembered) Boston Tea Party and the scandals of the Panama Papers. Along the way, readers meet a colorful cast of tax rascals, and even a few tax heroes.
While it is hard to fathom the inspiration behind such taxes as one on ships that tended to make them sink, Keen and Slemrod show that yesterday's tax systems have more in common with ours than we may think. Georgian England's window tax now seems quaint, but was an ingenious way of judging wealth unobtrusively. And Tsar Peter the Great's tax on beards aimed to induce the nobility to shave, much like today's carbon taxes aim to slow global warming.
Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue is a surprising and one-of-a-kind account of how history illuminates the perennial challenges and timeless principles of taxation—and how the past holds clues to solving the tax problems of today.
Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue
Tax Follies and Wisdom through the Ages
1 of 1 copy available
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
April 6, 2021 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780691199986
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780691199986
- File size: 37511 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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February 1, 2021
A spry survey of taxes over the course of history. Death and taxes are inevitable. So it has always been. As Keen, deputy director of fiscal affairs at the International Monetary Fund, and Slemrod, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, write, the Rosetta Stone, famous for giving clues about hieroglyphics, "describes a tax break given to the temple priests of ancient Egypt," adding, "so it also teaches us a quick early lesson: Tax exemptions are as old as taxes." The authors turn up plenty of interesting elements of tax applications through the centuries. For example, a British colonial tax on huts, when protested by colonized Africans, resulted in the burning of those huts; another colonial revolt, this time the Boston Tea Party, "was actually prompted not by some tax increase, but by a tax cut." Why is Bolivia landlocked? Because a Chilean company doing business there protested a tax imposed by the federal government, Chilean troops marched, and the borders were redrawn so that Chile gained the Atacama Desert and its long coastline as well as ownership of most of the world's nitrates. The lesson? That "rulers prefer to extract their resources from people on whom their popular support does not depend." If that's true, then why are so many offshore and multinational companies in the marketplace today? Chalk it up to an imaginative set of British brothers who secured a huge contract to supply the British army with beef during World War I, then broke up their operation "in an early example of 'inversion' " by moving their headquarters abroad. From margarine coloring to the birth of the big-box store, the authors link taxes to business history. Eventually, they note, governments may need to regularize their tax systems via something like a World Tax Organization, "setting and enforcing some aspects of tax rules in the way that the World Trade Organization has done for trade." It won't ward off the April tax blues, but it does a fine job of explaining the hows and whys of taxation.COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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