Dear RSF:
Please join us next Wednesday, February 4, at 11 in the library and on Zoom for a presentation by Visiting Scholar Ajay Mehrotra, “American Outlier: Economic Inequality and the Historical U.S. Resistance to the Value-Added Tax.”
Mehrotra is the Stanford Clinton Sr. and Zylpha Kilbride Clinton Research Professor of Law at Northwestern University with an additional appointment as Professor of History at Northwestern.
He’s also a research professor at the American Bar Foundation, where he served as Executive Director from 2015-2022. Prior to Northwestern, Mehrotra was a Professor of Law at Indiana University, Bloomington’s Maurer School of Law. He also held a dual appointment in History at Indiana. He is the co-editor of two edited volumes and a journal issue (Law & Contemporary Problems 86:3). His book Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics, and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877-1929 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) won the Society for U.S, Intellectual History Award (2014).
At RSF, Mehrotra is writing a book examining why the U.S. has historically resisted a broad-based national consumption tax, such as a value-added tax (VAT), and what that resistance reveals about inequality. His historical analysis of tax policy will investigate the role of fiscal experts in advancing or inhibiting a consumption tax, how different political interests have exerted power over the lawmaking process to support or oppose such taxes, and how historical events have created obstacles for supporters of a national consumption tax.