Bøker av Michael J. Graetz

How the antitax fringe went mainstream--and now threatens America's future The postwar United States enjoyed large, widely distributed economic rewards--and most Americans accepted that taxes were a reasonable price to pay for living in a society of shared prosperity. Then in 1978 California enacted Proposition 13, a property tax cap that Ronald Reagan hailed as a "second American Revolution," setting off an antitax, antigovernment wave that has transformed American politics and economic policy. In The Power to Destroy, Michael Graetz tells the story of the antitax movement and how it holds America hostage--undermining the nation's ability to meet basic needs and fix critical problems. In 1819, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that the power to tax entails "the power to destroy." But The Power to Destroy argues that it is tax opponents who now wield this destructive power. Attacking the IRS, protecting tax loopholes, and pushing tax cuts from Reagan to Donald Trump, the antitax movement is threatening the nation's social safety net, increasing inequality, ballooning the national debt, and sapping America's financial strength. The book chronicles how the movement originated as a fringe enterprise promoted by zealous outsiders using false economic claims and thinly veiled racist rhetoric--and how, abetted by conservative media and Grover Norquist's "taxpayer protection pledge," it evolved into a mainstream political force. The important story of how the antitax movement came to dominate and distort politics, and how it impedes rational budgeting, equality, and opportunities, The Power to Destroy is essential reading for understanding American life today.

Americans face economic hardship but respond with fantastical solutions, from tax-cut magic to the end of capitalism. Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro focus on what truly worries people: their own insecurity. The authors propose concrete reforms affecting jobs, unemployment, health care, and wages and share strategies to achieve changes people need.

Contains detailed text and explanatory materials. This seventh edition covers recent regulations, rulings, cases and other new developments, including the many changes made to the Internal Revenue Code by the several tax acts that Congress passed since the previous edition.

Social security in the USA may be the greatest triumph of American domestic policy. But true security has not been achieved. This work shows that the nation's system of social insurance is riddled with gaps, inefficiencies and inequities.

To most Americans, the United States tax code has become a vast and confounding puzzle. In 1940, the instructions to the form 1040 were about four pages long. Today they have ballooned to more than a hundred pages, and the form itself contains more than ten schedules andtwenty worksheets. The complete tax code totals about 2.8 million wordsabout four times the length of War and Peace. In this intriguing book, Michael Graetz maintains that our tax code has become a tangle of loopholes, paperwork, and inconsistenciesa massive social program that fails tests of simplicity and fairness. More important, our tax system has failed to keep pace with the changing economy, creating burdens and wastes of resources that weigh our nation down.Graetz offers a solution. Imagine a world in which most Americans pay no income tax at all, and those who do enjoy a far simpler tax processall this without decreasing government revenues or removing key incentives for employer-sponsored health care plans and pensions. As Graetzadeptly and clearly describes, this world is within our grasp.