The Rise and Fall of Wealth Taxation: An Inquiry into the Fiscal History of the American States.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the history of fiscal politics and policy in the American states. It provides a narrative synthesis from the antebellum period through the 1930s, during which state governments created a fiscal regime based on the general property tax and then replaced it with modern tax instruments like income taxes and especially general sales taxes. The historical arc of those transformations is encapsulated in the dissertation's title: the rise and fall of wealth taxation. Whereas the general property tax had been a wealth tax, the modern instruments taxed the masses. A historiographic critique is interwoven in that narrative. The dissertation's title also hints at the primary thesis: to make sense of state fiscal history, one must place wealth taxation at the center of the analysis. In addition, this analysis must be grounded in political economy, so that fiscal transformations can be connected to simultaneous transformations in electoral politics, and so that fiscal transformations are properly understood as arising mainly from the political problems and opportunities of the existing political-fiscal regime rather than being driven by narrowly socioeconomic forces. Such an orientation provides leverage on the key historical questions and helps avoid several common misperceptions. Another central argument is that we cannot correctly interpret the big transition -- from wealth taxation to mass taxation -- if we do not attend to the transitional tax instruments that states used during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: special or corporate property taxes, elite income taxes, and motor fuel taxes. The project also included the assembling of a fiscal dataset suitable for historical research. In addition to providing revenues and expenditures as reported by the underlying sources, the dataset includes harmonized data that uses a consistent set of classifications, facilitating historical analysis. Using this dataset and other sources, the dissertation provides an overview of the quantitative trends in American fiscal activity from 1800 to 2000. That overview culminates in a tabular periodization of the major fiscal regimes in the history of the United States.