Book Review: Miranda Stewart's Tax And Government In The 21st Century

Jonathan Grossberg & Andrew Gradman, Book Review and Interview with the Author, 42 ABA Tax Times 34 (Sept. 2023) (reviewing Miranda Stewart (Melbourne), Tax and Government in the 21st Century (2022)) (reviewed by Neil Buchanan (Florida; Google Scholar) here): 

Miranda Stewart’s Tax and Government in the 21st Century is an excellent introduction to tax policy. It lays out the major concerns of tax policy in understandable terms from a variety of angles: law, accounting, public finance and economics, and sociology and comparative studies. It draws on quantitative and qualitative data from countries around the world, though primarily focusing on English-speaking countries. While many works in the tax policy area focus primarily on individual and/or corporate income taxes, Stewart’s work discusses consumption taxes, wage taxes (e.g., payroll), and wealth taxes (including inheritance, land and property, capital gains, and retirement savings), and individual and corporate income taxes, as well as other taxes that may be imposed upon corporations and businesses. Furthermore, and again unlike many introductory tax policy works, an entire chapter is devoted to issues of tax administration and compliance, in addition to discussion of these topics throughout the book. Two chapters are devoted to international tax issues.

Despite this ambitious breadth, the book is unified by a few key themes. Stewart has spent her career studying what she terms the “tax state”: this book is a tour of the intellectual history of the idea. As Stewart explains in Chapter 1, “a tax state is a particular form of fiscal governmental organisation that relies on tax revenues extracted in a sustainable fiscal bargain with taxpayers ... Tax states evolved over the last three centuries but they are fundamentally a product of the twentieth century.”

The definition reminds us that our current fiscal bargain is a product of history and should not be taken for granted as the best fit for the twenty-first century.