A thoughtful, rigorous plan to make the tax code more morally and rationally defensible.
A comprehensive overhaul of the United States tax system.
The American system of taxation has become so encumbered by gratuitous complication and inequity that tax reform is an issue that’s championed on both sides of the political aisle. In his debut, Fishman provides a method to fix a broken code in a way that avoids rewriting it in its entirety; it also generally lowers taxes and compels everyone, individuals and businesses alike, to pay their fair share. The principal feature of his proposal is the elimination of what he sees as a pernicious “structural defect”: the tax deduction. He sees it as not merely a mechanical faux pas, but as a mistake, noting that politicians are endlessly incentivized to create new ones each year to satisfy their supporters, mostly benefiting the wealthy. As affluent people and corporations repeatedly diminish their own obligations, he says, the middle and lower classes shoulder a disproportionate tax burden; additionally, the revenue the government needs for essential services plummets. The author doesn’t simply demonize corporations, however; the tax code, he says, has essentially punished them for profitability, encouraging them to seek out such lucrative loopholes. Fishman would eliminate all business taxes on net profits and replace them with a modest one on gross sales while also expanding the payroll tax to fund health care. He would also do away with personal income tax, similarly replacing it with a payroll tax based on gross annual income. He includes plans for a value-added tax, estate taxes, excise taxes, and others and furnishes an extended discussion on Social Security, health care spending, and national defense—all areas that he says could be more adequately funded by a more rational and fair approach to taxation. Overall, this brief but painstakingly researched proposal deserves to be part of the national conversation on tax reform. Fishman discusses highly technical concepts in largely quotidian prose and seems unencumbered by an ax-grinding political agenda. One defect of the work, though, is that it seems too dismissive of the political obstacles to fixing a system that’s politically afflicted in the first place. The book’s principal virtue is its cool-headed assessment of the facts combined with a genuine passion for equality.
A thoughtful, rigorous plan to make the tax code more morally and rationally defensible.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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