Milton Friedman in Washington (1941-1943) on taxation and the inflationary gap

The aim of the work is primarily to reconstruct Friedman's activity in the period 1941-1943, and then to attempt to understand to what extent it was influenced by a Keynesian view regarding income and prices determination. The section 'The activity in Washington: the Ruml Plan' will be devoted to summarising the debate on the pay-as-you-go system of taxation, which was highly technical and less interesting for our purpose, but which pointed to two elements that we often find in Friedman's writings of the period, namely the need to curb private purchasing power during the war years and the necessity of equity in taxation to support the war effort. We will then go on to analyse Friedman's works on the 'inflationary gap' and his writings on the spending tax, which are both central in evaluating Friedman's activity in his Washington phase. Finally, in the section 'Some final remarks' the content of Friedman's writings in the years 1941-1943 will be compared with those after the war with a view of assessing differences and similarities. Albeit as a first assessment, his initial 'Keynesian illness' will indeed appear to have been less serious and deep than Friedman himself feared.