We Are Better Than This: How Government Should Spend Our Money - Hardcover

excellent on the revenue side, laying out what a better tax system would look like, challenging perverse tax expenditures, and countering predictable objections about incentives, economic distortions, and fairness. (Peter H. Schuck, Barron's)

... clearly makes a major contribution to public political discourse regarding inequality and the role of government. (Daniel Shaviro, National Tax Journal)

This book focuses on Kleinbards value judgments concerning fiscal policy; specifically, it centers on his opinions about government taxation and spending policies. (E. P. Hoffman, Western Michigan University, CHOICE)

Americans feel the pain of an income tax system that raises twice as much as it actually does because of hidden spending through tax favors. This masterpiece on how we tax ourselves, and how Congress spends our money, explains why the mostly lightly taxed modern country feels so heavily burdened while offering workable solutions. (David Cay Johnston, Book of the year 2014, News Week)

Packed with powerful data, fresh insights, unassailable analysis, and a set of recommendations that are both economically and politically viable... [A] compelling critique of market triumphalism and the economist who helped to shape it. (Washington Post)

Kleinbard's viewpoint is both moral and farsighted...Kleinbard's ability to make the complexities of fiscal policy comprehensible permeates We Are Better Than This. So does his impatience, even anger, with the partisan sophistry that passes for much of fiscal and economic discussion in Washington... Kleinbard's book presents a challenge and a reproach to the America of recent decades; it's time the challenge was met. (Los Angeles Times)

Edward Kleinbard knows as much about taxation in America as anyone alive. (Bloomberg Businessweek)

Like Adam Smith, whom he cites throughout, Kleinbard is a moral philosopher. He sits astride society with tax tables and charts and thinks clearly, with great depth and insight, about what a better society would look like. (Jared Bernstein's On the Economy Blog)

This masterpiece of tax, fiscal, and economic policy is richly endowed with philosophical in- sights from Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments and holds the potential to change our often dogmatic and sometimes toxic public debate over how we tax ourselves and spend our tax dollars into a conversation about how to raise more money with less pain and spend in ways that will produce a happier America. (Tax Notes)

We Are Better Than This is firmly grounded in a sound understanding of politics, Congressional process and fiscal policy, but transcends 'wonkery' to focus on the ends we are trying to achieve as a society. While so many in Washington propound ideological agendas, Edward Kleinbard calls on our better angels to consider the kind of world we want for our communities, for our nation, and for our future generations. He then leads the reader through consideration of the best possible economic policies to get us there, regardless of ideology. Kleinbard recognizes that government and private sector have complementary strengths and weaknesses that can be managed to achieve the best American system. (Senator Ron Wyden, Oregon, Chairman, Senate Finance Committee)

We Are Better Than This fundamentally reframes budget debates in the United States. Author Edward D. Kleinbard explains how the public's preoccupation with tax policy alone has obscured any understanding of government's ability to complement the private sector through investment and insurance programs that enhance the general welfare and prosperity of our society at large.
He argues that when we choose how government should spend and tax, we open a window into our "fiscal soul," because those choices are the means by which we express the values we cherish and the regard in which we hold our fellow citizens. Though these values are being diminished by short-sighted decisions to starve government, strategic government spending can directly make citizens happier, healthier, and even wealthier.
Expertly combining the latest economic research with his insider knowledge of the budget process into a simple yet compelling narrative, he unmasks the tax mythologies and false arguments that too often dominate contemporary discourse about budget policies. Large quantities of comparative data are succinctly distilled to situate the United States among its peer countries, so that readers can judge for themselves whether contemporary budget choices really reflect our aspirational fiscal soul.
Kleinbard's presentation takes a multi-disciplinary approach, drawing on economics, finance, law, political science and moral philosophy. He uniquely weaves economic research and moral philosophy together by emphasizing our welfare, not just our national income, and by contrasting the actual beliefs of Adam Smith, a great moral philosopher, with the cartoon version of the man presented by proponents of the most extreme forms of private market triumphalism.