Book Description

Their Fair Share: Taxing the Rich in the Age of FDR takes an engaging look at the evolution of today¿s tax code, as FDR found his reformist intentions tempered by lawmakers on the right and left: conservatives like Rep. Harold Knutson of Minnesota, warning the media about ''short-haired women and long-haired men of alien minds in the administrative branch ... trying to wreck the American way of life'' and firebrands like Huey ''Kingfish'' Long, who rejected Roosevelt¿s incremental approach to stump for a guaranteed minimum income and old-age pensions. Even more sober players like Treasury officials Henry J. Morgenthau Jr., Jacob Viner, and Herman Oliphant differed on whether to ''soak the rich'' through steep progressive levies or ''save the poor'' by extending the income tax to the middle class and forestalling federal consumption taxes. Then, as today, we have the president with a progressive reputation who proves more pragmatic than his ardent supporters had hoped. The legislators serve the media with apoplectic rhetoric. The magnates pay no income tax and defend this with the perfectly accurate argument that it is 100 percent legal. And the public is keenly invested in seeing everyone pay their fair share. Joseph J. Thorndike has mined rich insight from governmental and popular media archives to yield vital insights about our tax code and how Americans feel about it, then and now.