Cool hand Calvin: 'Coolidge' details the president who loved
cutting taxes Share with others: U.S. Treasury Secretary Andrew
W. Mellon was "beaming" on the morning of Feb. 26, 1926,
reporters observed. And well he might have been. President
Calvin Coolidge was set to sign the Revenue Act of 1926, a bill
that would slash Mellon's income-tax bill and keep all tax
returns private. Under the new rates, "Mr. Mellon himself gets a
larger personal reduction than the aggregate of practically all
the taxpayers in the state of Nebraska," Sen. George Norris, a
political rival, had said during debate on the legislation. By
Amity Shlaes That statistic doesn't disconcert Amity Shlaes, the
author of "Coolidge," an exhaustive and at times exhausting
biography of the nation's 30th president and one of the more
obscure. Admittedly Mellon was a getting a whopper of a tax
break -- his top rate was dropping from 46 percent to 25 percent
-- but the Pittsburgh industrialist and banker had been paying
more taxes than all the citizen