by Donald S. Chambers Curtis W. Chambers ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
A lucid, thorough reflection on the income tax that manages to be both rigorous and accessible.
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A bold assessment of the toll that the income tax has exacted on the American economy, coupled with a plan to replace it.
A father and son, in their debut, proffer a brief but densely packed analysis of the income tax. Unlike many treatments of income tax opposition, they don’t dwell on its constitutionality—an argument whose ship has sailed. Instead, they marshal empirical evidence against the tax, arguing that its replacement by a national sales tax would benefit all American citizens. Helpfully, the book begins with a synoptic account of the history of the income tax, which didn’t exist prior to the Civil War and was passed following World War II. It was initially designed to remain a modest measure, the authors write; however, it ballooned into the primary source of the government’s revenue, and the authors assert that it gradually strangled the prospects of fair competition in an increasingly global economic theater. Now, according to the authors, it ranks as an “economic natural disaster.” They devote much of their discussion to dispelling what they consider to be commonly held misconceptions about the income tax. For example, they argue that the tax is actually regressive, not progressive, and that the brunt of it is ultimately paid by consumers who absorb the cost through inflated prices and deflated salaries. Also, they say, the tax is effectively a self-imposed tariff that disadvantages American businesses competing with foreign rivals: “The income tax raises the cost of domestically produced goods sold in the U.S., but it does not apply an equal tax to foreign-produced goods sold in the U.S.” Although they narrowly confine the scope of their investigation to the income tax, their analysis always involves the U.S. economy as a whole, as they contend that the tax is “the major impediment to America’s economic prosperity.” They also judiciously consider the tax’s political context and realistically acknowledge the many obstacles facing the tax’s elimination.
A lucid, thorough reflection on the income tax that manages to be both rigorous and accessible.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9860436-04
Page Count: 78
Publisher: Mountain Home Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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by Lorenzo Carcaterra ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 1995
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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