Law Commons^™

Making Money From Cryptocurrency? The Taxman May Call On You, Hern Kuan Liu, Vincent Ooi

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Miners, forgers, hobbyists, traders – different rules apply. Just don’t assume crypto investment is somehow immune to taxation.

The Taxation Of Cryptocurrency Gains, Vincent Ooi

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Taking Singapore as an example, this article lays out a series of tests for determining whether gains arising from the disposal of cryptocurrencies are trade or business income, “all other income” or capital gains. It also considers the possibility of a presumption that individuals engaging in such transactions are gambling.

Reframing Taxigration In The Search For Tax Justice, Jacqueline Lainez Flanagan

Journal Articles

The Search for Tax Justice is a Tax Notes State series examining the inequities inherent in state and federal taxes. In this installment, Jacqueline Laínez Flanagan, associate professor of law and director of the University of the District of Columbia’s David A. Clarke School of Law Tax Clinic, discusses tax challenges faced by immigrants and responds to myths about the undocumented taxpayer community.

Singapore’S Special Insolvency Scheme For Small Companies, Vincent Ooi, Aurelio Gurrea-Martinez

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In this article, the authors examine a temporary program in Singapore to help micro and small businesses facing insolvency amid the COVID-19 crisis.

Marijuana Taxation: Theory And Practice, Benjamin Leff

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Marijuana legalization creates a host of complex legal problems, not the least of which is how to best tax the emerging legal market. This Essay attempts to bridge the gap between tax theory and marijuana policy to make some modest claims. First, it roots the discussion of state-level marijuana taxation in the theoretical distinction between ordinary revenue-raising taxes and "Pigouvian" or regulatory taxes. It makes the somewhat controversial claim that the best taxing strategy for states is to attempt to capture as much of the marijuana legalization premium as possible without driving consumers into the illegal market and that other …

Decoupling State Income Tax From Federal: Current Taxation Of Unrealized Gain, The New York Proposal, Henry Ordower

All Faculty Scholarship

A proposal decouples NY from federal tax computations to tax billionaires on unrealized appreciation. If enacted, the proposal generates basis discontinuities across borders but enhances state revenue and may prove attractive to many states. The article reviews how states seek to enhance revenues and considers issues of cross-border taxation and the fundamental right to travel.

Does The Supreme Court’S Decision In Wayfair Apply Retroactively?, Walter Hellerstein, Andrew D. Appleby

Scholarly Works

A recent decision of the Oregon Tax Court suggests that it may be premature to dismiss the challenging questions raised by the retroactive application of Wayfair as entirely hypothetical. Accordingly, after providing an overview of the case law governing retroactive application of Supreme Court state tax decisions repudiating preexisting constitutional doctrine, we examine the Oregon Tax Court’s opinion in Global Hookah Distributors Inc. v. Department of Revenue, which addressed the question whether Wayfair applied retroactively to the state’s tobacco products tax.

Taxation Of The Digital Economy: Adapting A Twentieth-Century Tax System To A Twenty-First-Century Economy, Assaf Harpaz

Scholarly Works

This Article analyzes the tax challenges of digitalization and the potential solutions to address them. This Article argues in favor of a multilateral approach and proposes applying a new tax nexus based on market thresholds subject to a global de minimis amount. As more companies conduct business online, current international tax law and its principles have failed to adapt to global commercial practices. Digital-tech giants such as Facebook, Google and Amazon have been able to exploit the international tax framework by avoiding a physical presence in the jurisdiction of their consumers. As a result, profits of highly digitalized enterprises can …

Tax Policy And Covid-19: An Argument For Targeted Crisis Relief, Assaf Harpaz

Scholarly Works

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a sharp global economic decline. By the end of 2021, the U.S. government responded to the downturn with record fiscal legislation totaling over $5 trillion, which includes considerable tax relief. Most notably, the U.S. government distributed over $800 billion in three rounds of advanced refundable tax credits (known as recovery rebates, or stimulus checks) to most households. Tax relief has been unprecedented in scale but has often been the product of political circumstances rather than principled policy design. Tax relief thus remains largely undertheorized and politically motivated.

This Article examines the U.S. tax policy response to …

New York’S Proposed Mark-To-Market Tax Decouples From Federal Tax, Henry Ordower

All Faculty Scholarship

A proposal decouples NY from federal tax computations to tax billionaires on unrealized appreciation. If enacted, the proposal generates basis discontinuities across borders but enhances state revenue and may prove attractive to many states. The article reviews how states seek to enhance revenues and considers issues of cross-border taxation and the fundamental right to travel.

How To Measure And Value Wealth For A Federal Wealth Tax Reform, David Gamage, Ari Glogower, Kitty Richards

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Over the last several decades, wealth inequality has exploded, warping economic outcomes and limiting opportunity—for individuals and for the US at large.

Sky-high income inequality and runaway income gains for the nation’s highest earners compound that wealth inequality and are insufficiently taxed under the current tax regime.

Further, wealth in the US has always been heavily skewed by race.

Since the country’s founding, US laws and customs have prevented Black and brown people from receiving fair wages and accruing assets, thereby creating and perpetuating today’s massive racial wealth gap.

While our existing tax systems are ill-equipped to tackle these challenges, …

The Growth Of Vancouver As An Innovation Hub: Challenges And Opportunities, Camden Hutchison, Li-Wen Lin

All Faculty Publications

This article assesses the development of Vancouver as an entrepreneurial region. Using data collected from commercial startup databases, we find that Vancouver produces more startups and receives more venture capital financing per capita than any other major Canadian city. However, we also find that Vancouver lags many U.S. cities on these same metrics. In light of our empirical findings, we explore whether differences in entrepreneurial activity between Canada and the United States are due to differences in the countries’ legal environments. We conclude that legal differences do not explain observed economic disparities, and that differences in entrepreneurial activity are due …

Why A Federal Wealth Tax Is Constitutional, Ari Glogower, David Gamage, Kitty Richards

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The 2020 Democratic presidential primaries brought national attention to a new direction for the tax system: a federal wealth tax for the wealthiest taxpayers. During their campaigns, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) both introduced proposals to tax the wealth of multimillionaires and billionaires, and to use the revenue for public investments, including in health care and education. These reforms generated broad public support—even among many Republicans—and broadened the conversation over the future of progressive tax reform.

A well-designed, high-end wealth tax can level the playing field in an unequal society and promote shared economic prosperity.

Critics have …