Taxing state/welfare state: How the politics of Aid to Families with Dependent Children and the federal income tax shaped modern America, 1960--1980.

Taxing State/Welfare State: Policy and Politics in Postwar America focuses on the intersection and politicization of federal welfare and tax policies between 1950 and 1980. This dissertation argues that understanding how and why taxes have moved to the center of contemporary political debate helps to explain the transformation of American politics from a contest over how to distribute the benefits of citizenship to one centrally concerned with how to reduce and distribute its costs. Grounded in a close analysis of the Internal Revenue Code and the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, this study reconsiders the content of postwar liberalism as well as the origins, extent and nature of the conservative revolution of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. This dissertation demonstrates that the low-tax mantra, now a staple of conservative political rhetoric, had its genesis in the fiscal politics of postwar liberals who understood low tax rates and an expanded welfare state as complementary elements of a progressive reform agenda. Liberals' fealty to a low-tax policy program, their unwillingness to address the economic dimensions of racial disadvantage and their rejection of a rhetorical strategy grounded in the moral defense of social and economic justice laid the foundations of a political culture centrally concerned to protect the property rights of taxpayers against the illegitimate rights claims of tax eaters in the federal government and on the welfare rolls. The postwar commitment to macroeconomic fiscal management and the defense of the rights of the taxpayer/citizen eventually undermined policymakers' willingness and ability to tackle the seemingly intractable dilemmas of racial and class inequality. By embedding policy analysis within a broader political narrative about economic growth and decline, racial change, social mobility and partisan realignment, this study connects contemporary welfare and tax politics and the so-called right turn in American politics to the institutional legacies and ideological commitments of postwar liberalism.Ph.D.American historyPublic policySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125832/2/3224699.pd