Taxes matter. They matter to every American worker whose paycheck is cut in half by state, local, and federal taxes. They matter to the millions of Americans who file income tax returns each year. They matter to the state, local, and national governments that depend on tax revenue to provide necessary public services. Taxes matter to economists and policymakers who seek to manage the national economy, to control inflation, and to combat unemployment. They matter to the millions of older Americans who rely on Social Security and Medicare, and to the workers whose payroll taxes fund those entitlement programs. Taxes...

In January 1947, Thomas Waxter, chief of the Baltimore Department of Welfare (BDW) announced cutbacks in the city’s public assistance programs and called on a local, nongovernmental group to investigate his department and recommend measures to “remedy any defects” in the existing system.¹ Only weeks later, the city’s largest daily newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, premiered the first in a seven-part series of front-page articles exposing how fraud, inexperience, and lax administration in the BDW had already taken considerable sums “out of the taxpayer’s pocket.”² That same year, in New York City, the local press’s discovery of a few families living...

In 1960, few Americans could have found Newburgh, New York, on a map, much less have been able to identify its local politicians. A year later, thanks to the well-publicized campaign by the city’s town manager, Joseph Mitchell, to rid the city of welfare “chiselers, loafers and social parasites,” Newburgh had become a household name.¹ Mitchell’s controversial “13-point plan” to reform the city’s welfare system—a plan that included a daily military-style muster of public assistance recipients in front of the Newburgh City Hall—made the small-town politician into a minor celebrity and transformed welfare into what Los Angeles Times...

Early in 1967, public opinion expert Ben Wattenberg issued President Lyndon Johnson a simple warning: the administration’s focus on the War on Poverty and the war in Vietnam threatened to cost the Democratic Party the affection and votes of the “middle-class working man in America.” Although it had been only a few years earlier that “union men had looked to the federal government for the same things that today the persons in poverty look for,” the landscape of middle- and working-class America had changed. Where American workers could once be found in slums they were now more likely to be...

In February 1973, a group of thirty St. Louis taxpayers dressed in eighteenth-century costumes celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of the Boston Tea Party by heaving food and medicine crates into the Mississippi River. Carrying signs that read “Fair Taxation or New Representation,” the protesters marched through the city, handing out leaflets attacking “unfair” and “burdensome taxes on food and medicine.” When they reached the downtown offices of the Missouri Department of Revenue, the protesters stopped briefly to affix their demands for tax justice to the door of the building. Message delivered, the group continued the march to the levee,...

Early in the summer of 1980, Robert Johnson and Ron Pramschuffer, two enterprising Maryland businessmen of the “Archie Bunker persuasion,” figured out how to translate the rage of the “white lower middle class” into a board game.¹ Their brainchild, Public Assistance: Why Work for a Living When You Can Play This Great Welfare Game, hit the stores later that year, just in time for the holiday shopping season.² Modeled after Monopoly, the game retailed for about $16 and included a game board, four playing pieces, four identical pieces representing each player’s live-in or spouse, a set of cardboard pieces representing...

The tax and welfare politics described in this study continue to shape American social and economic policy and to define American politics. Although “welfare as we knew it” no longer exists, thanks to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, the specter of welfare hangs over domestic policymaking. In the 2008 presidential race, Senator John McCain, who had fallen behind Senator Barack Obama in the polls, turned to tax and welfare politics as the closing argument in his effort to win over undecided voters.¹ “When politicians talk about taking your money and spreading it around, you’d better hold...