Customer Reviews

The Permanent Tax Revolt: How the Property Tax Transformed American Politics

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If you are interested in understanding the politics of taxation, you must read this important book. Martin calls into question many commonly-held beliefs about both the causes and effects of tax cuts, and in particular California's Proposition 13. Looking backward we tend to understand proposals to cut taxes as an expression of distrust in government and a belief that unregulated markets produce better outcomes. Martin shows that property tax protest resulted from professionalization of property tax assessment, which ended informal tax breaks that many homeowners had come to expect. These changes happened in California (and many other states) at a time when the real estate market was booming. The result was that property taxes increased quickly as market values rose. Martin shows that initial resistance to rising property taxes came from both the right and the left, although the proposed solutions differed. Martin portrays this response as a sort of Polyanian second movement (without explicitly invoking Karl Polyani's The Great Transformation), that is, a movement for government intervention to protect people from the excesses of the free market. The book traces the transformation of tax protest from a broad-based social movement into a partisan issue championed by the Republican Party and from a response to particular economic circumstances to a one-size-fits-all permanent part of the G.O.P. platform. Martin's analysis is based on careful empirical research, using a variety of methods (quantitative, archival, comparative) to answer the book's key questions. For an academic book on a topic that tends toward the technical, the prose is clear and approachable.

This book is as good as it gets (for an academic book, not an insignificant caveat). In clear accessible prose, Martin dissects the property tax and its unlikely adoption by conservative politics in the United States. Before you snore, there are a lot of interesting stories behind this story: that the property tax is one of the oldest taxes in North America, the tax privilege that 1970s tax revolutionaries were fighting for was the largest governmental social program ever, and how it was good government practices, not corruption, that caused the backlash against the property tax. Ultimately, the tax revolts changed the way the US pays for its public investments--especially education--and made taxes the third-rail of modern politics. Any serious citizen would be well served by Martin's patient historical vision that overturns much conventional wisdom.

Excellent analysis of the history, politics, and consequences of the "tax revolt" that created the ideology of the contemporary Republican Party and, through Prop 13, is destroying the state of California.

This book examines much more than the conditions and history of the tax protest movements of the 1960s and 70s. It traces how the remnants of the civil rights movements melded with the libertarian right to push property tax reform - often with competing intentions and policy prescriptions. In particular, Martin masterfully examines how the institutions of direct democracy and federalism in the United States interacted with these social movements to determine the rightward turn in the property reform tax movement. Lastly, and critically, this historical study convincingly pin points where and how the general tax cut become a permanent fixture of the modern day Republican Party.

Martin tells the often complex story with readable and surprisingly lively historical narratives, quantitative methods, and precise case studies, juxtaposing the American tax protest movements with those of Europe. As a student of economics, I appreciated the wide range of methods Martin uses to tell a convincing and in depth story. A potentially dry subject brought to life - A must read for scholars of American public finance, fiscal sociology, and comparative taxation.

I would suggest saving your time and money by reading the Homevoter Hypothesis by Bill Fischel instead. The Permanent Tax Revolt misses the mark by not addressing capitalization (especially the capitalization of fractional assessments; see Yinger et al 1980 book on property tax reform and capitalization) and by assuming the free lunch of fractional assessment was never eaten.