#88 Taxation, the Great Depression, and the GOP Tax Reform w/ Robert McElvaine
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2018
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Taxation is a controversial topic in the United States. Some Americans see taxation as a penalty on hard work, while others see it as a way to alleviate social ills and discourage activity they deem undesirable. And because taxation is inseparable from the question of government's role in people's lives, it is one of the issues that most divides the two major parties in modern America. In today's episode, Bob and Ben speak with Robert McElvaine, an expert on the history of the Great Depression, to get his take on what the past can teach us about tax policy and the economy. McElvaine explains why he thinks that history has disproven the Republican principle of supply side economics, and why he sees the recent GOP-backed tax reform as reminiscent of the policies that led the US into the Great Depression.
Dr. Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts and Letters and Professor of History at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. He is the author of seven books and the editor of three, including The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941 (Times Books/Random House, 1984, 1993; 25th anniversary edition, 2009). He also pinned an op-ed in the Washington Post entitled "I'm a Depression Historian. The GOP Tax Bill is Straight Out of 1929" (Nov. 30, 2017).
This episode is the first in a two-part series on taxation and the economy. The second installment, a conversation with the Manhattan Institute's Brian Reidl, will offer a conservative perspective on tax policy, and will be released on Monday, March 18.
The Road to Now is part of the Osiris Podcast Network. You can learn more about this episode and browse others at TheRoadToNow.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to The Road to Now. I'm Ben Sawyer. Today we're bringing you an episode about the economy. There's been a lot of discussion about the tax cuts and its relationship to employment and the overall economy at large. And so we wanted to give a couple of episodes attention to this factor and what history |
| 0:23.5 | can teach us about it. |
| 0:24.5 | So in our first of these two episodes, we invited Robert McElvane, who is a professor |
| 0:29.8 | of history at Millsaps College and one of the country's foremost experts on the Great |
| 0:34.9 | Depression. |
| 0:35.7 | We got in touch with him because he recently published |
| 0:37.8 | an article in The Washington Post, an op-ed that was entitled, I'm a Depression historian, |
| 0:43.2 | and the GOP tax bill is straight out of 1929. He published this op-ed back in November, and we |
| 0:50.0 | wanted to talk to him about it because it was a really great application of the past to the present. |
| 0:54.9 | And so we finally caught up with him and we recorded this episode a few weeks ago. |
| 0:59.0 | Now, it is fascinating. |
| 1:00.6 | We talk about the relationship between tax policy and the Great Depression, what we can |
| 1:04.9 | learn now, kind of what have we learned in the past about the way tax breaks relate to |
| 1:10.0 | the economy. |
| 1:11.9 | And honestly, as you guys know, this is the stuff that's right at my alley. I love this conversation. Now, when we got through |
| 1:16.5 | with it, Bob and I were talking, and we felt like, even though this is a really smart conversation, |
| 1:21.3 | it definitely leaned more towards the left or more towards what people would say would be the |
| 1:26.3 | democratic perspective on things. So as a part of our goal to make sure that our audience is informed and not simply |
| 1:33.0 | given one very strong perspective on an issue, we decided that we were going to do a second |
| 1:37.5 | episode on this with Brian Riedel, who has a more conservative perspective on the economy. |
| 1:42.9 | So today's episode is one of two episodes |
| 1:45.8 | that will be airing back to back. The next one will be next Monday and will feature Brian |
... |
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