Law Commons^™

'Death And Taxes' And Hypocrisy, John W. Lee

Faculty Publications

Professor Lee finds the "death and taxes" poem by Rep. Ewing hypocritical for several reasons. He notes that the poem is derived from a 1920s populist attack on Treasury Secretary Mellon for cutting taxes on the rich in the name of trickle-down economics while relying on regressive excise taxes on the masses -- an attack similar to that waged by then-Governor Clinton during the 1992 presidential campaign. Further, says Lee, the Bush administration displayed more of a preference for regressive excise taxes than the Clinton plan, whose reliance in part on consumption taxes appears a consequence of 25 years of …