Vanessa Williamson
Senior Fellow at Brookings
Berkeley, CA
Experience
- Senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings
- Senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center
Expertise
- U.S. economic policy
- Tax and revenue policy
- Labor
- Wealth Inequality
- Trade
Education
- Harvard University, PhD, Social Policy
- New York University, MA, French Studies
- New York University, BA, French Language and Literature
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About Vanessa
Vanessa Williamson is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings, and a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. She studies taxation and democracy in America.
Her forthcoming book, “The Price of Democracy,” reveals the revolutionary power of taxation in American history (Basic Books, September 2025). She is also the author of “Read My Lips: Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes,” and, with Harvard professor Theda Skocpol, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.”
She has written on school segregation, tax opinion, and tax politics in the Washington Post; about the Tea Party, anti-union legislation and voter registration at income tax filing in the New York Times; about taxpayer citizenship in the Atlantic; about philanthropy and austerity and white supremacy in Dissent; and about democracy and organizing for Teen Vogue. She has discussed her research on NPR’s “Marketplace”, C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal”, CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS”, CNBC’s “Squawk Box”, and MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.” She received her Ph.D. in social policy from Harvard University.
