Taxing America

by Brown, Karen B.; Fellows, Mary Louise

• ISBN13: 9780814726617
• ISBN10: 0814726615
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-01-01
• Publisher: New York Univ Pr

Summary

In the winter of 1996, Steve Forbes--publisher, heir, and presidential candidate--captured the American imagination with his proposal for a flat tax. But while Mr. Forbes claimed that such a tax would level the economic playing field by eliminating countless loopholes and miles of red tape, his actual proposal betrayed such claims to fairness by overtaxing workers and undertaxing financial capital.In the face of recent proposals for dramatic and far-reaching tax reform, Taxing America takes a critical look at the way the federal government collects its revenue and exposes the bias at the heart of a system which claims to be objective and fair. Contrary to traditional tax scholarship, these writers argue that an awareness of disability discrimination, economic exploitation, heterosexism, sexism and racism is crucial to any analysis of tax policy.Gathering together essays whose topics range from federal housing policy to environmental clean-up costs to tax treaty policy making, Karen B. Brown and Mary Louise Fellows present a philosophy that is as simple as it is radical: economic arrangements contribute significantly to the creation of social hierarchies and the perpetuation of discrimination. Given this reality, Brown and Fellows maintain that the goal of the federal tax law should be social justice and the disruption of discriminatory and exploitative practices.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction	p. 1
Expanding the Tax Discourse: New Ways to Think About Wealth, Income, Race, and Gender
Fiction in Tax	p. 25
The Marriage Bonus/Penalty in Black and White	p. 45
Taxation and Human Capital	p. 58
How Government Tax and Housing Policies Have Racially Segregated America	p. 80
Challenging Tax Traditions: The Bias of the Investment/Consumption Dichotomy
Acknowledging Workers in Definitions of Consumption and Investment: The Case of Health Care	p. 119
Shifting from an Income Tax to a Consumption Tax: Effects on Expenditures for Education	p. 146
Consumption in Business/Investment at Home: Environmental Cleanup Costs versus Disability Access Costs	p. 170
Rethinking Development: Old Practices, Old Rules, New World
Economic Development: Taxes, Sovereignty, and the Global Economy	p. 197
Transforming the Unilateralist into the Internationalist: New Tax Treaty Policy toward Developing Countries	p. 214
The Future of Deferral: Taxing the Income of U.S. Multinationals	p. 233
Implementing Subsidies: Tax Relief for Savers and for Workers
The American Dream Savings Account: Is It a Dream or a Nightmare?	p. 253
Simplification for Low-Income Taxpayers: Some Options	p. 277
The Uncertain Fate of the Earned Income Tax Credit Program	p. 297
Welfare Reform, the Child Care Dilemma, and the Tax Code: Family Values, the Wage Labor Market, and the Race- and Class-Based Double Standard	p. 322
Contributors	p. 347
Index	p. 353
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