The Rise of the States
The Rise of the States

Author: Jon C. Teaford

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2002-05-03

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780801868894

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In The Rise of the States, noted urban historian Jon C. Teaford explores the development of state government in the United States from the end of the nineteenth century to the so-called renaissance of states at the end of the twentieth. Arguing that state governments were not lethargic backwaters that suddenly stirred to life in the 1980s, Teaford shows instead how state governments were continually adapting and expanding throughout the past century. While previous historical scholarship focused on the states, if at all, as retrograde relics of simpler times, Teaford describes how states actively assumed new responsibilities, developed new sources of revenue, and created new institutions. Teaford examines the evolution of the structure, function, and finances of state government during the Progressive Era, the 1920s, the Great Depression, the post–World War II years, and the post–reapportionment era beginning in the late 1960s. State governments, he explains, played an active role not only in the creation, governance, and management of the political units that made up the state but also in dealing with the growth of business, industries, and education. Not all states chose the same solutions to common problems. For Teaford, the diversity of responses points to the growing vitality and maturity of state governments as the twentieth century unfolded.

Making the Modern American Fiscal State
Making the Modern American Fiscal State

Author: Ajay K. Mehrotra

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-09-30

Total Pages: 447

ISBN-13: 1107436001

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

At the turn of the twentieth century, the US system of public finance underwent a dramatic transformation. The late nineteenth-century regime of indirect, hidden, partisan, and regressive taxes was eclipsed in the early twentieth century by a direct, transparent, professionally administered, and progressive tax system. This book uncovers the contested roots and paradoxical consequences of this fundamental shift in American tax law and policy. It argues that the move toward a regime of direct and graduated taxation marked the emergence of a new fiscal polity - a new form of statecraft that was guided not simply by the functional need for greater revenue but by broader social concerns about economic justice, civic identity, bureaucratic capacity, and public power. Between the end of Reconstruction and the onset of the Great Depression, the intellectual, legal, and administrative foundations of the modern fiscal state first took shape. This book explains how and why this new fiscal polity came to be.

The Price of Progress
The Price of Progress

Author: R. Rudy Higgens-Evenson

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2003-05-01

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 0801875897

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Between the Civil War and the Great Depression, twin revolutions swept through American business and government. In business, large corporations came to dominate entire sectors and markets. In government, new services and agencies, especially at the city and state levels, sprang up to ameliorate a broad spectrum of social problems. In The Price of Progress, R. Rudy Higgens-Evenson offers a fresh analysis of therelationship between those two revolutions. Using previously unexploited data from the annual reports of state treasurers and comptrollers, he provides a detailed, empirical assessment of the goods and services provided to citizens, as well as the resources extracted from them, by state governments during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.Focusing on New York, Massachusetts, California, and Kansas, but including data on 13 other states, his comparative study suggests that the "corporate state" originated in tax policies designed to finance new and innovative government services. Business and government grew together in a surprising and complex fashion. In the late nineteenth century, services such as mental health care for the needy and free elementary education for all children created new strains on the states' old property tax systems. In order to pay for newly constructed state asylums and schools, states experimented for the first time with corporate taxation as a source of revenue, linking state revenues to the profitability of industries such as railroads and utilities. To control their tax bills, big businessesintensified lobbying efforts in state legislatures, captured important positions in state tax bureaus, and sponsored a variety of government-efficiency reform organizations. The unintended result of corporate taxation—imposed to allow states to fulfill their responsibilities to their citizens—was the creation of increasingly intimate ties between politicians, bureaucrats, corporate leaders, and progressive citizens. By the 1920s, a variety of "corporate states" had proliferated across the nation, each shaped by a particular mix of taxation and public services, each offering a case study in how the business of America, as President Calvin Coolidge put it, became business.