(FORTUNE Magazine) – Donald Barlett and James Steele want you to believe that Congress and Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton have conspired with ''the monied interests'' against the poor and the middle class to create ''two separate and distinct tax systems, one for the rich and powerful -- call it the Privileged Person's Tax Law -- another for you and everyone else -- call it the Common Person's Tax Law.'' Even Clinton's 8.6 percentage point increase in the top marginal rate doesn't impress them. They want you to be so steamed by the time you arrive at the last page of America: Who Really Pays the Taxes? that you will wonder, along with them, whether the only way to fix the tax code is via armed insurrection. Long before you reach that point, you may suspect that something about this argument is fishy. Sure, the tax system is a mess. In fact, it's become a kind of rococo masterpiece of inefficiency and perverse incentives. But a cabalistic scheme for redistributing income from the poor to the wealthy? Hardly. Barlett and Steele, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporters from the Philadelphia Inquirer, interviewed taxpayers and ferreted facts and anecdotes from newspapers, magazines, and government documents. They used all the weapons of journalism -- the heart-rending story, the outrageous anecdote, the suggestive juxtaposition of facts, the selective use of statistics. What they failed to do was ask whether anyone had explored this territory before. Had they done so, they would have found that ''who pays the taxes'' is a central question in public finance economics and that the literature on the subject is vast. A basic lesson of this literature -- one apparently unknown to Barlett and Steele -- is that the person who sends the check to the government is not necessarily the one who bears the burden of the tax. The authors are incensed, for instance, that corporations don't pay more income tax, but seem unaware that ultimately all corporate taxes are paid either by shareholders, customers, or employees. They might have learned that the income tax was not highly progressive in the 1950s, as they seem to think, because the top marginal tax rates were effectively offset by loopholes. That insight -- well understood by liberal and conservative economists alike -- fatally undercuts one of their central arguments: that a lessening of tax progressivity in recent decades helped shrink the middle class. But Barlett and Steele didn't interview economists, whom they suspect of having a vested interest in the corrupt status quo, and instead opted for the closed loop of the conspiracy theorist. They probably will sell a lot of books -- there's always a market for outrage -- but they have subtracted rather than added to the sum total of knowledge of the U.S. tax system.