Katherine S. Newman (Dean, School of Arts & Sciences, Johns Hopkins University) & Rourke O’Brien (Ph.D Student, Princeton University), Taxing the Poor
Doing Damage to the Truly Disadvantaged (University of California Press, 2011):

This book looks at the way we tax the poor in the United States,
particularly in the American South, where poor families are often
subject to income taxes, and where regressive sales taxes apply even to
food for home consumption. Katherine S. Newman and Rourke L. O’Brien
argue that these policies contribute in unrecognized ways to
poverty-related problems like obesity, early mortality, the high school
dropout rates, teen pregnancy, and crime. They show how, decades before
California’s passage of Proposition 13, many southern states implemented
legislation that makes it almost impossible to raise property or
corporate taxes, a pattern now growing in the western states. Taxing the Poor
demonstrates how sales taxes intended to replace the missing
revenue—taxes that at first glance appear fair—actually punish the poor
and exacerbate the very conditions that drove them into poverty in the
first place.

New York Times: In the South and West, a Tax on Being Poor, by Katherine S. Newman (Dean, School of Arts & Sciences, Johns Hopkins University):

While the federal government has largely stuck by the principle of
progressive taxation, the states have gone their own ways: tax policy is
particularly regressive in the South and West, and more progressive in
the Northeast and Midwest. When it comes to state and local taxation, we
are not one nation under God. In 2008, the difference between a working
mother in Mississippi and one in Vermont — each with two dependent
children, poverty-level wages and identical spending patterns — was
$2,300.

These regional disparities go back to Reconstruction, when
Southern Republicans increased property taxes on defeated white
landowners and former slaveholders to pay for the first public services —
education, hospitals, roads — ever provided to black citizens. After
Reconstruction ended in 1877, conservative Democrats — popularly labeled
“the Redeemers” — rolled taxes back to their prewar levels and inserted
supermajority clauses into state constitutions to ensure it could never
happen again. Property taxes were frozen; income taxes were held down;
corporate taxes were almost nonexistent.

Practically the only tax
that could rise was the one that hurt the poor the most: the sales tax.
And rise it did, throughout the Deep South in the late 19th century,
then spreading into the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida and the rest of the
region in the 1960s and 1970s. Even liberal politicians weren’t able to
buck the tide — just ask Bill Clinton, who as governor of Arkansas
urgently sought new revenue to improve his state’s ailing schools and
found the sales tax was the only politically viable option.

(Hat Tip: Francine Lipman.)