Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Rebellion, Rascals, & Revenue: Tax follies & wisdom through the ages
Author: KEEN MICHAEL/SLEMROD JOEL
Illustrator: 59 B/W ILLUS.
Format: HARDCOVER
Publication date: 01/07/2021
Imprint: PRINCETON UNI PRESS
Price: $45.00
Publishing status: Active
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 colourful cast of tax rascals, and even a few tax hero
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 yesterdays tax systems have more in common with ours than we may think. Georgian Englands window tax now seems quaint, but was an ingenious way of judging wealth unobtrusively. And Tsar Peter the Greats tax on beards aimed to induce the nobility to shave, much like todays 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.
ISBN: 9780691199542
Dimension: 235mm X 156mm