The Common Sense of a Wealth Tax: Thomas Paine and Taxation as Freedom from Aristocracy
![handle is hein.journals/ftaxr26 and id is 333 raw text is: FLORIDA TAX REVIEW
Volume 26 2022 Number]
THE COMMON SENSE OF A WEALTH TAX: THOMAS PAINE AND
TAXATION AS FREEDOM FROM ARISTOCRACY
by
Jeremy Bearer-Friend and Vanessa Williamson*
ABSTRACT
Thomas Paine's writing helped spur the American colonies to indepen-
dence and ensure that the new nation would be a republic, not a monar-
chy. In light of the renewed interest in wealth taxes, this article provides a
close examination of Thomas Paine's wealth tax proposal in the second
volume ojThe Rights of Man. Unlike Paine's proposal to tax inheritances,
his 1792 proposal to tax wealth on an annual basis is often overlooked.
The article identifes Paine's various design specifcations, provides orig-
inal estimates of the impact of Paine's wealth tax proposal within his
own time period and as applied to billionaires today, and discusses
* Respectively, Associate Professor of Law, George Washington
University Law School; Senior Fellow, Governance Studies, The Brookings
Institution. We are grateful to William Gale, Ari Glogower, Viva Hammer,
Dmitry Karshtedt, Robin Morgan, Chas Tyler, Kate Weisburd, Arthur
Wilmarth, Jr., Gabriel Zucman and the GW Law Junior Faculty Workshop for
thoughtful comments and suggestions. This work was made possible in part
by the extraordinary efforts of Scott Pagel and Lori Fossum at the GW Law
Library & Kevin Delinger at the Georgetown University Library, who tracked
down seven eighteenth century editions of the second volume of Rights of
Man in order for us to verify whether a math error appeared in the original
text. Our research also relied on publicly available data collected by T.V. Jack-
son and hosted by the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex and also by
Peter Lindert hosted by UC Davis, for which we give our thanks. Lastly, we
are grateful to Daniella Cho, Jackson Gode and Naomi Maehr for excellent
research assistance. Any errors are our own.
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The Common Sense of a Wealth Tax: Thomas Paine and Taxation as Freedom from Aristocracy
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