{"podcast":{"title":"The Road to Now","slug":"the-road-to-now-1065183","podcast_index_feed_id":1065183,"rss_url":"https://roadtonow.libsyn.com/rss","website_url":"http://www.theroadtonow.com/","image_url":"https://static.libsyn.com/p/assets/8/4/8/2/84823a80490190e9/RTN_Logo_Season_2.jpg","author":"Benjamin Sawyer","episode_count":460,"summary":"Bob Crawford (The Avett Brothers) & Dr. Ben Sawyer (MTSU History) share conversations with great thinkers from a variety of backgrounds – historians, artists, legal scholars, political figures and more –who help us uncover the many roads that run between past and present. For more information, visit TheRoadToNow.com If you'd like to support our work, join us on Patreon: Patreon.com/TheRoadToNow","last_synced_at":"2026-07-06T12:20:49.072601+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-road-to-now-1065183"},"episode":{"title":"#365 Taxes: An American History w/ Vanessa S. Williamson","slug":"365-taxes-an-american-history-w-vanessa-s-williamson","published_at":"2026-04-06T10:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-road-to-now-1065183/365-taxes-an-american-history-w-vanessa-s-williamson","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-road-to-now-1065183","url":"https://rtnpod.me/listen","audio_url":"https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/roadtonow/365_taxes_for_feed.mp3?dest-id=384142","summary":"Did you know that the Boston Tea Party was sparked by a corporate tax cut? Or that during the explosive post-WWII economic boom, the highest tax bracket in the US was about 90%? Or that the more democratic a country is, the more taxes its citizens tend to pay? In this episode, Vanessa S. Williamson joins us for a conversation about her new book, The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History (Basic Books, 2025), the misunderstandings that shape both liberal and conservative attitudes toward tax policy, and the reasons she thinks that taxation and democracy are inseparable in US history. Dr. Vanessa S. Williamson is Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institute and Senior Fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher .","meta_description":"Did you know that the Boston Tea Party was sparked by a corporate tax cut? Or that during the explosive post-WWII economic boom, the highest tax bracket i…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":4115,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-road-to-now-1065183/episodes/365-taxes-an-american-history-w-vanessa-s-williamson/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-road-to-now-1065183/365-taxes-an-american-history-w-vanessa-s-williamson.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}