The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy and What to Do About It

The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy and What to Do About It

The Greedy Hand is an illuminating examination of the culture of tax and a persuasive call for reform, written by one of the nation's leading policy makers, Amity Shlaes of The Wall Street Journal .          The father of the modern American state was an obscure Macy's department store executive named Beardsley Ruml.  During World War II, he devised the plan for withholding taxes from your paycheck, thereby laying in place a system that allows the hand of government to reach into your wallet and take what it wants.          Today, taxes make up more than a third of our economy, the highest level in history outside war.  We live in the nation revolutionary father Thomas Paine foresaw when he wrote of "the Greedy Hand of government thrusting itself into every corner of industry." This book is a cultural examination of the way taxes influence our behavior, how they force us into an arbitrary system that punishes families and individual enterprise.          Amity Shlaes unveils the hidden perversities of our lifelong tax experience:  how family tax breaks do little to help the family, and can even hurt it.  She demonstrates how married women pay a special women's tax rate, higher than anybody else's.  She shows how problems that engage and enrage us--Social Security problems, or the things we don't like about schools--are, at heart, tax problems.  And she explains why the solutions Washington offers merely accelerate a vicious cycle.          Finally, Amity Shlaes shows us a way out of this madness, endorsing a number of common-sense reforms that will give all Americans a fairer and simpler tax system. Written with eloquent compassion for working Americans and their families, The Greedy Hand makes the best case yet for rethinking our tax code. It is a book no tax-paying citizen can afford to ignore. Americans are being taxed to death--literally, says author Amity Shlaes in The Greedy Hand . At work or out shopping, upon marriage or even after death, we are paying more in taxes than ever before, according to Shlaes, a Wall Street Journal editorial writer. The average family with two wage-earners is now seeing almost 40 percent of its money go to local, state, and federal taxes. "The greedy hand of government"--first described by American revolutionary Thomas Paine--is greedier than ever, creating a situation ripe for tax reform, if not revolt, Shlaes writes. "We think of our forefathers who felt compelled to rebel against the Crown for 'imposing Taxes on us without our consent.' We know we live in a democracy, and so must have chosen this arrangement. Yet nowadays we find ourselves feeling that taxes are imposed on us 'without our consent'," she writes. Chapter by chapter, and in great detail, Shlaes analyzes the tremendous burdens imposed by a wide range of taxes. She assails the marriage penalty, for example, and exposes problems with Social Security and the estate tax. And she documents how Americans feel increasingly unhappy with what government does with their money and shows how people go to great lengths to avoid taxes--driving across state lines to escape a sales tax, for instance. Shlaes calls for political leaders to overhaul the nation's tax code and suggests starting with guiding principles like the following: "Taxes have to be simple;" "Taxes have to be lower;" and "It's time to privatize Social Security." The Greedy Hand warns that the tax system damages the economy and hurts working people, and is a good read for anyone who wants to rail intelligently about taxes. --Dan Ring Shlaes, an editorialist on tax policy for the Wall Street Journal, has produced a short polemic against taxes. She devotes her chapters to ten types of taxation, including job, marriage, house, baby, and death taxes, and how they affect our lives. As a fiscal (though not social) conservative, she decries taxes as taking an ever-increasing percentage of our income, as an agent of social engineering (or wealth transfer), and as unpredictable?and she's surprised that there has not been a general tax revolt owing to these problems. Shlaes saves her short list of recommendations for her summary chapter, though her case against progressive tax rates is unconvincing. Like most good Journal reporting, this book is nonscholarly and understandable to the general reader, and Shlaes has liberally interspersed interesting examples and insights throughout. An optional purchase for public libraries.?Patrick J. Brunet, Western Wisconsin Technical Coll. Lib., La Crosse Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. Taxation is the function of government that everyone loves to hate. And here the Wall Street Journal's editorialist on tax matters adds to the hallowed and estimable tradition of grousing about it. Shlaes (Germany: The Empire Within, 1991) doesn't assail the Internal Revenue Service. She realizes instead that the IRS only does its assigned job. Rather, it's the legislators and lobbyists who create the tax monster that scare