Modern Wars And War Taxes

This book provides a comprehensive overview of military finance, including discussions on various forms of taxation during times of war. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

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Excerpt from Modern Wars and War Taxes: A Manual of Military Finance Recent discussions on armaments and kindred subjects have brought to light the curious fact that there does not exist in the English language a text-book of military finance. Every branch of military science has been diligently studied and exploited with this remarkable exception. So far as the writer is aware, no systematic attempt has yet been made to measure the financial strength of the great Military Powers. This book is the result of a modest endeavour to supply that defect. Starting from the simplest and most essential form of the war problem, it shows that armaments are, in the present state of society, an unavoidable evil. It treats of sea power as the factor in the war problem which specially concerns the British people. What British arms have to defend and maintain at any cost is the British Empire. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This is a curated and comprehensive collection of the most important works covering matters related to national security, diplomacy, defense, war, strategy, and tactics. The collection spans centuries of thought and experience, and includes the latest analysis of international threats, both conventional and asymmetric. It also includes riveting first person accounts of historic battles and wars.Some of the books in this Series are reproductions of historical works preserved by some of the leading libraries in the world. As with any reproduction of a historical artifact, some of these books contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. We believe these books are essential to this collection and the study of war, and have therefore brought them back into print, despite these imperfections.We hope you enjoy the unmatched breadth and depth of this collection, from the historical to the just-published works.

Introduction: This book explores the long history of American taxation during times of war. As political scientist David Mayhew recently observed, since it's founding in 1789, the United States has conducted hot wars for some 38 years, occupied the South militarily for a decade, waged the Cold War for several decades, and staged countless smaller actions against Indian tribes or foreign powers. The cost of these activities has been immense, with important and lasting consequences for the tax system, the economy, and the nation's political structure. By focusing on tax legislation, we hope to identify some of these consequences. But we are not interested in simply recounting statutory details. Rather, we hope to illuminate the politics of war taxation, with a special focus on the influence of arguments concerning "shaped sacrifice" in shaping wartime tax policy. Moreover, we aim to shed light on a less examined aspect of this history by offering a detailed account of wartime opposition to increased taxes.

"Why have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq lasted longer than any others in American history? One view is that the move to an all-volunteer force and drones have allowed the wars to continue almost unnoticed for years. Taxing Wars suggests how Americans bear the burden in treasure has also changed, with recent wars financed by debt rather than taxes. This shift has eroded accountability and contributed to the phenomenon of perpetual war"--

The total wars of the modern era triggered the expansion of redistributive taxation in the West, contributing to an unprecedented decline in economic inequality. After 1945, armed conflicts have continued to ravage mainly low- and middle-income societies. Disparate in appearance, these contemporary conflicts, including civil wars, led to the same dire fiscal pressures and inequitable socio-economic outcomes as their historic predecessors. Yet their impact on tax policy has until now remained opaque. Drawing on the historical experience of the West, a more general theory of the positive link between war and redistributive taxation is developed, based on three complementary causal pathways. War-time tax-increases are driven by revenue needs; facilitated by citizens' fiscal patriotism; but crucially skewed towards the rich by popular demands for fiscal fairness, induced by the inequities of war itself. To test these arguments, I analyse original data on war-time taxation through a mixed methods research design. First, the causal effect of conflict on redistributive taxation is estimated through an econometric analysis of yearly data on top personal income tax rates, collected for a quasi-exhaustive sample of 61 conflict-affected countries over six decades. Extending the analysis, the introduction of designated war taxes - a particularly informative subset of war-time taxes - across the contemporary world is mapped and analysed through comparative statistics and micro-case studies. Finally, two single case studies - one primary (Croatia) and one auxiliary (Syria) - are studied in-depth with a particular focus on causal pathways and conditional factors. The results show that contemporary armed conflicts have led to exceptionally redistributive taxation, no less so than in Western history. The link, however, disappears after the Cold War. With the initial conditions persisting, an array of evidence indicates that this was a direct result of the post-Cold War macro-political shifts, leading to the expansion of the neoliberal paradigm and the emergence of increasingly powerful conflict-elites, both erecting barriers towards progressive taxes.

A major work of history, The Great Tax Wars is the gripping, epic story of six decades of often violent conflict over wealth, power, and fairness that gave America the income tax. It's the story of a tumultuous period of radical change, from Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War through the progressive era under Theodore Roosevelt and ending with Woodrow Wilson and World War I. During these years of upheaval, America was transformed from an agrarian society into a mighty industrial nation, great fortunes were amassed, farmers and workers rebelled, class war was narrowly averted, and America emerged as a global power. The Great Tax Wars features an extraordinary cast of characters, including the men who built the nation's industries and the politicians and reformers who battled them -- from J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie to Lincoln, T.R., Wilson, William Jennings Bryan, and Eugene Debs. From their ferocious battles emerged a more flexible definition of democracy, economic justice, and free enterprise largely framed by a more progressive tax system. In this groundbreaking book, Weisman shows how the ever controversial income tax transformed America and how today's debates about the tax echo those of the past.

This unique volume offers a definitive new history of European economies at war from 1914 to 1918. It studies how European economies mobilised for war, how existing economic institutions stood up under the strain, how economic development influenced outcomes and how wartime experience influenced post-war economic growth. Leading international experts provide the first systematic comparison of economies at war between 1914 and 1918 based on the best available data for Britain, Germany, France, Russia, the USA, Italy, Turkey, Austria-Hungary and the Netherlands. The editors' overview draws some stark lessons about the role of economic development, the importance of markets and the damage done by nationalism and protectionism. A companion volume to the acclaimed The Economics of World War II, this is a major contribution to our understanding of total war.