Books by Joseph J. Thorndike

Joseph J. Thorndike's history of the U.S. federal tax system from the 1920s until the end of World War II might feel familiar: the president with a progressive reputation who proves more pragmatic than his ardent supporters hoped, the legislators who serve the media apoplectic rhetoric, the magnates who pay no income tax and defend themselves with the perfectly true argument that doing so is 100 percent legal, and the public interested seeing everyone pay their fair share. Thorndike mines governmental and popular media archives to explore both the scholarship of taxes and the way we feel about paying them.

Perhaps the most important quality of a tax system is that citizens consider it fair. Yet agreement on what a just tax would look like is one of the most difficult questions in economics. This book advances knowledge considerably on this controversial topic by providing a variety of new perspectives culled from economics, law, history, and religion.