It won’t ward off the April tax blues, but it does a fine job of explaining the hows and whys of taxation.
Death and taxes are inevitable. So it has always been. As Keen, deputy director of fiscal affairs at the International Monetary Fund, and Slemrod, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, write, the Rosetta Stone, famous for giving clues about hieroglyphics, “describes a tax break given to the temple priests of ancient Egypt,” adding, “so it also teaches us a quick early lesson: Tax exemptions are as old as taxes.” The authors turn up plenty of interesting elements of tax applications through the centuries. For example, a British colonial tax on huts, when protested by colonized Africans, resulted in the burning of those huts; another colonial revolt, this time the Boston Tea Party, “was actually prompted not by some tax increase, but by a tax cut.” Why is Bolivia landlocked? Because a Chilean company doing business there protested a tax imposed by the federal government, Chilean troops marched, and the borders were redrawn so that Chile gained the Atacama Desert and its long coastline as well as ownership of most of the world’s nitrates. The lesson? That “rulers prefer to extract their resources from people on whom their popular support does not depend.” If that’s true, then why are so many offshore and multinational companies in the marketplace today? Chalk it up to an imaginative set of British brothers who secured a huge contract to supply the British army with beef during World War I, then broke up their operation “in an early example of ‘inversion’ ” by moving their headquarters abroad. From margarine coloring to the birth of the big-box store, the authors link taxes to business history. Eventually, they note, governments may need to regularize their tax systems via something like a World Tax Organization, “setting and enforcing some aspects of tax rules in the way that the World Trade Organization has done for trade."
It won’t ward off the April tax blues, but it does a fine job of explaining the hows and whys of taxation.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-691-19954-2
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.
Tired of the lies about the 2020 election? Buckle up: Trump is just warming up, and his allies may be getting craftier.
“This is not a book about January 6, 2021. It is a book about January 6, 2025,” write legal scholars Lessig and Seligman. We are lucky, Lessig suggests, that John Eastman and his fellow plotters “picked the dumbest possible strategy for pursuing what we feared they were trying to accomplish”: namely, trying to convince Mike Pence that he had the constitutional authority to refuse to certify the results by which Joe Biden won the presidency. One might argue that the second dumbest strategy was to send an army of fascist goons to the Capitol to try to enforce Eastman’s argument. However, Lessig and Seligman argue, there are holes in the Constitution wide enough to drive a burning dumpster through, and they might allow an interested party to falsely claim victory in a closely contested race and win the election. The authors presume that any such gaming-the-system effort will come from MAGA Republicans, though they add that a Democrat could easily use the same tactics. Readers may need a law degree to follow some of the arguments, but others are quite accessible. One argument that Lessig has been mounting for some time, for instance, is that the winner-take-all method employed by most states for electoral votes needs to be replaced with an apportionment system so that the Electoral College count will align with the popular vote. On that score, the authors warn, the prospect of rogue electors—or more, rogue governors who control those electors—is very real, and numerous other threats could enable someone smarter than the last bunch to mount “a cataclysmic attack on our democracy.”
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780300270792
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
