1. After finishing his M.A., Vickrey worked for the National Resources Planning Board and the U.S. Treasury Department. During the war, he designed a new inheritance tax for Puerto Rico and used this experience to illustrate his arguments in the book;Vickrey went to Columbia as a graduate student in 1935 and received his M.A. in 1937 and his Ph.D. in 1947,1135
2. gives a portrait of the interest in excise taxes in the 1950s in part as a reaction to practical fiscal concerns. He describes the situation as: -the growing concern with the pre-eminence of income taxation in the federal tax structure (...) led to speculation about the ?limits of tax capacity' and resulted in a pressure to re-examine the whole tax system, often with the avowed intention of shifting the emphasis toward indirect taxes;Rozental;421, and references therein), guided by Walter Heller (who was at the University of Minnesota at the time),1957
3. On Optimal Taxation and Public Production