Buchanan Reviews Stewart's Tax & Government In The 21st Century

Neil Buchanan (Florida; Google Scholar), Gender Issues in the Modern Tax State (JOTWELL) (reviewing Miranda Stewart (Melbourne), Tax & Government in the 21st Century (Cambridge University Press 2022)):

Why are gender and unpaid work issues continually marginalized in tax policy analysis? After all, feminist legal theorists have spent at least two generations trying to address questions that should be at the center of any analysis of government policy, no matter one’s political priors. People who want to turn the clock back to a 1950’s-style gendered hierarchy, for example, surely would want to know that their version of utopia (which, to be clear, I find positively dystopian) cannot possibly be created without understanding how government taxation and spending policies change people’s decisions about marriage and divorce, child-bearing and -rearing, the challenges of poverty (both sudden and chronic), and so on. Progressives are typically more aware of those connections, but somehow the “tax is different” mantra prevents many people from seeing that gender justice and tax justice are inseparable.

Miranda Stewart, a professor of tax law at the University of Melbourne, has long carried on important work to bring these issues to the fore. Her latest book, Tax & Government in the 21st Century, is a masterwork that covers the full range of issues that confront us, from savings and wealth, to corporate and business taxation, to the global digital economy, and every important issue in between.

She builds her book on historical and philosophical foundations, discussing Adam Smith and the interactive development and evolution of states and capitalism (of various varieties). Confronted with a veritable buffet table of enticing potential topics to savor in this short review, I find that her most profound contribution (among many) is in Chapter 5, “Tax, Work, and Family.”

Most books that have attempted the daunting task that Professor Stewart tackles here with such grace have, like much of the literature in this field more generally, tended to treat gender and family issues as a niche topic, as I noted above. In this book, those issues are given equal airtime with classic tax policy topics like capital gains taxation or international jurisdictional disputes. That makes sense, of course, because Professor Stewart is deeply familiar with feminist legal theory, even as she has expertise across the range of topics that she covers in this book. ...

While it is not quite accurate to say that the tax-policy book market is a crowded one, there are surely plenty of perfectly fine books from which to choose, all of which cover the standard topics (tax base, international tax, wealth taxation, and so on) well enough. What makes this book stand out is not only its breadth and readability but a keen focus on how our tax system can have hidden impacts on people – and bringing those impacts into the light.