High Rates and Low Taxes

Amidst calls for a return to the high tax rates of the 1950s and 60s, this book examines the tax dodging that accompanied it. Lacking political will to lower the rate, Congress riddled the laws with loopholes, exemptions, and preferences, while largely accepting income tax chiseling’s rise in American culture. The rich and famous openly invested in tax shelters and de-camped to exotic tax havens, executives revamped the compensation and retirement schemes of their corporations to suit their tax needs, and an industry of tax advisers developed to help the general public engage in their own form of tax dodging through exaggerated expense accounts, luxurious business travel on the taxpayer’s dime, and self-help books on ‘how the insider’s get rich on tax-wise’ investments. Tax dodging was a part of almost every restaurant bill, feature film, and savings account. It was literally woven into the fabric of society.

Author Biography

Steven A. Bank is the Paul Hastings Professor of Business Law at UCLA School of Law. He has written extensively on the history of taxation, including Anglo-American Corporation Taxation: Tracing the Common Roots of Divergent Approaches (Cambridge 2011), From Sword to Shield: The Transformation of the Corporate Income Tax, 1861 to Present (2010), and War and Taxes (2008) (with Kirk J. Stark and Joseph J. Thorndike). His work has been awarded the John Minor Wisdom Award for Academic Excellence in Legal Scholarship, the De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek Prize, and has been selected for the Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum.