Distributing the Tax Burden in Postwar America: Empirical Estimates and Normative Principles

Abstract This article examines the quantification of the US tax burden in the postwar period. Much of the effort can be attributed to a desire to measure the fairness of a tax system that had undergone a series of radical changes in response to financing demands of the Second World War and the Korean War. We focus on an influential study of the distribution of the US fiscal burden directed by Richard Musgrave at the turn of the 1950s. Musgrave's results were challenged on technical grounds by conservative economists. Despite a strong social consensus for progressivity during the New Deal order, the empirical evidence was that the tax system was not as progressive as some claimed. This stylized fact crafted by Musgrave and a small group of Washington-affiliated technocrats lent support to a tax philosophy that emphasized a concern for equity. The cognitive infrastructure they forged influenced tax reform debates.