Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics, and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877-1929
Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics, and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877-1929
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DOI：
10.1093/jahist/jav119
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发表时间：
2015-03
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影响因子：
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通讯作者：
N. Parrillo
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作者：
N. Parrillo
Following the Civil War, the American state emerged as a unique political institution. The Union government had possessed the largest standing army in the world during the military conflict, but after the cessation of hostilities much of it was disbanded, along with a good deal of the state apparatus built during the war. The national income tax enacted during the first years of the conflict was drastically reduced after the war and then allowed to expire in 1872 as the national government returned to its traditional nineteenth-century sources of revenue: excise taxes, revenue from the occasional sale of public lands, and custom duties. The bulk of that revenue was derived from the system of high protective tariffs crafted by Republicans during the war and maintained in the decades that followed. As Frank Taussig put it in his classic study of nineteenth-century Republican tax policy, the retention of the high wartime tariff rates ‘‘brought about gradually a feeling that such a system was a good thing in itself, and desirable as a permanent policy’’ (Taussig 1894, 194). With increased international trade and commerce in the decades following the Civil War, the protective tariffs raised enormous revenue for the national government. From the end of the Civil War until the First World War, anywhere from 30 percent to 60 percent of federal receipts were derived from customs duties. As revenue from the tariff alone exceeded annual federal expenditures, the national government enjoyed the luxury of budget surpluses in every fiscal year from 1866 to 1893. This potent combination of limited government and revenue from high protective tariffs left the national government in a highly favorable financial position. This led Henry George, the eclectic economist, to quip in 1883 that ‘‘the great question before Congress is what to do with the surplus’’ (George 1911, 168). The response of successive Republican Congresses to the ‘‘problem’’ of annual surpluses ‘‘was to authorize greater and greater largess for the Civil War veterans and their (ever more distant) relatives’’ (Higgs 1987, 97). From 1880 to 1910, the national government devoted more than a quarter of its expenditures to paying pensions to veterans of the Union cause. At the peak of the program in 1893, there were 966,012 pensioners (most located in the North), and the national government spent a whopping
