A highly accessible history of Republican tax policy.

A fascinating account of the long history of antitax sentiments within the Republican party, Refinancing America looks at how opposition to income and wealth taxation became the dominant factor influencing the party's political agenda. The countless proposals for tax cuts introduced by Republicans in Congress during the 1990s, as well as the Bush administration's $1.6 trillion tax cut in May 2001, were not aberrations, but rather the continuation of a long tradition of hostility to taxation. Nevertheless, the rhetoric and devotion to the antitax cause in the 1990s was more pronounced than in the past, and this book explains how this more extreme strain of antitax politics came to dominate the GOP.