12:43 p.m., March 9, 2010----As the ongoing debate over health care reform elicits strong views about the cost and whether taxpayers should cover the hefty cost, the history of revenue collection in the development of the United States into a superpower and the genesis and consequences of social welfare programs, are the subject of a new book, War, Revenue and State Building, by Sheldon Pollack, University of Delaware professor of legal studies in the Department of Accounting and Management Information Services in the Lerner College of Business and Economics.

THIS STORY

E-mail

Print

Twitter

Pollack describes the critical role of public revenue, especially in times of war, in the ability of the U.S. to fight and triumph in two world wars and the creation of modern social welfare programs that have become an essential component of American society.

War, Revenue and State Building (Cornell University Press, 2009), discusses the coercive powers of the state, which include the ability to raise revenue, and traces the role of revenue in the development of the modern state, including the role of the military at war and the companion benefits that eventually extend to the public in the form of social welfare structures.

In the book, which has been nominated for the American Political Science Association's J. David Greenstone Award for the best book in politics and history published in 2009, delves into the development of the American state, its initial deficiencies and limitations, and the transition to a new constitution that granted the government new powers to extract revenue from society. The author ties the increasingly important role of tax revenue to war and well-established tax-funded social welfare systems.

"Revenue is critical to state development because modern states, with their powerful armies and vast bureaucracies, require enormous revenue," Pollack writes. "Without that revenue, maintenance of state institutions, let alone expansion, is impossible. Every exercise of state power requires revenue, and the more developed the state, the more revenue is required."

The book was the topic of a roundtable panel at the annual conference of the American Political Science Association in Toronto, Canada, in September 2009.

Speaking about the book, Pollack warned that while revenue collection is a key component of a modern state, the rapid growth in the U.S. federal deficit, fueled by massive government spending and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is unsustainable.

"We are approaching debt levels close to 40 percent of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and the projection is that we can approach the 90 percent level we had during World War II."

Pollack points out that some of the pitfalls of huge tax-funded social welfare programs are now evident in the U.S., where popular social programs have become a significant burden on the exchequer.

"Today, Social Security and Medicare have transformed the American state into a massive 'transfer state' that redistributes hundreds of billions of dollars annually across generations, collecting the money from young workers via the wage tax and distributing the proceeds to their parents and grandparents in the form of retirement and healthcare benefits," Pollack writes. "But with fewer workers contributing taxes and more retirees collecting benefits, the system is financially unsustainable."

Pollack, who has taught at UD since 1994, holds joint appointments in the Department of Political Science and International Relations and in the Legal Studies Program. He served as the director of the Legal Studies Program from 2003-09.

Pollack was awarded a bachelor's degree at the University of Rochester in 1974, earned a doctorate from Cornell University in 1979, and a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law in 1986. He was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar in 1986.

Pollack has been a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, both in Washington, D.C. He previously taught political science at the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University, and practiced tax law with the Philadelphia law firm of Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll LLP.

Pollack has written articles in such journals as Tax Notes, Taxes, Journal of Taxation, American Journal of Tax Policy, Tax Adviser, Tax Law Review, The Labor Lawyer, Society, Polity, The New Republic, Legal Affairs and The American Prospect.

Pollack is the author of two other books: The Failure of U.S. Tax Policy: Revenue and Politics (Penn State Press,1996) and Refinancing America: The Republican Antitax Agenda (State University of New York Press, 2003).

Article by Martin A Mbugua