Web Hosting by Netfirms | Free Domain Names by Netfirms

Greedy Hand

How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy and What to Do About It

by  Amity Shlaes

The Greedy Hand is an illuminating examination of the culture of tax and a persuasive call for reform, written by one of the nation's leading policy makers, Amity Shlaes of The Wall Street Journal.

The father of the modern American state was an obscure Macy's department store executive named Beardsley Ruml. During World War II,  he devised the plan for withholding taxes from your paycheck, thereby   laying in place a system that allows the hand of government to reach into   your wallet and take what it wants.

Today, taxes make up more than a third of our economy, the highest level in   history outside war. We live in the nation revolutionary father Thomas Paine foresaw when he wrote of "the Greedy Hand of government thrusting itself   into every corner of industry." This book is a cultural examination of the way   taxes influence our behavior, how they force us into an arbitrary system that  punishes families and individual enterprise.

Amity Shlaes unveils the hidden perversities of our lifelong tax experience:   how family tax breaks do little to help the family, and can even hurt it. She   demonstrates how married women pay a special women's tax rate, higher   than anybody else's. She shows how problems that engage and enrage   us--Social Security problems, or the things we don't like about schools--are, at heart, tax problems. And she explains why the solutions   Washington offers merely accelerate a vicious cycle.

Finally, Amity Shlaes shows us a way out of this madness, endorsing a   number of common-sense reforms that will give all Americans a fairer and   simpler tax system. Written with eloquent compassion for working   Americans and their families, The Greedy Hand makes the best case yet for   rethinking our tax code. It is a book no tax-paying citizen can afford to ignore.

Author Biography

Amity Shlaes is the youngest member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, where she is an editorialist on tax policy. Her writing has also been published in Commentary and The New Yorker. She is the author of Germany: The Empire Within. A magna cum laude graduate of   Yale University, she lives in New York City with her husband, Seth Lipsky, and their three children.

Random House   Hardcover   March 1999

0-375-50132-0

LIST  $  22.95 +  S/H

OUR  $  20.95 + S/H

_{Copyright 1997-2001  Riverside Information Services 1450 University Ave. PMB F126  Riverside, Ca. 92507-4467}