The U.S. Income Tax: What It Is, How It Got That Way, and Where We Go from Here

How to make sense of the American tax mess (and the cures that are supposed to fix it), with a new afterword for the paperback edition (originally titled The Decline (and Fall?) of the Income Tax). Dissatisfaction with the income tax has grown so high that attacks on it, and proposals to reform (or even abolish) it, now amount to an almost constant dull roar. How has it happened that ordinary Americans have come to regard the federal income tax as unfair and tax protesters as heroes? Trenchant and timely, this book locates the answers in both the substance of the Internal Revenue Code and the political process that created and feeds this monstrous law. Michael J. Graetz shows plainly how the income tax has become a political football; how government has allowed its complexities to grow with no thought of their impact on taxpayers; and, most of all, how PAC funds and special interests have affected Congress's will to reform the system. Graetz also looks closely at the various flat-tax and consumption-tax proposals and shows why they are not as fair or simple as their advocates claim. With colorful anecdotes to explain his argument, Graetz points the way to tax reforms that really are simple, sensible, and fair. The U.S. Income Tax is a book for everyone concerned with where our tax dollars go and what we get for them.