Tax Education After WWII: How Spain, the USA, and West Germany Tried to Make Their Citizens Pay Honestly

State education in honest tax payment can be understood as a facet of training in citizenship, i.e. as an attempt by the modern state to standardize the behavior of its citizens and to prevent deviations. Based on this Foucauldian understanding, this exploratory article examines tax education in the United States, Spain, and West Germany from the mid-1940s to the late 1980s. During this period, the USA asserted itself as the champion of tax education and Spain consistently tried to emulate this example, albeit with more modest means and different semantic strategies from as early as the 1960s, when it was still under a autoritarian regime. The FRG, however, completely discontinued its few early attempts at tax education from the mid-1950s onwards. Even during the economic crises and tax scandals of the 1970s, there was no relaunch of the programs. The article locates the reasons for this highly uneven development in the different ideal images of the citizen in the three states.