Law Commons^™

Against Monetary Primacy, Yair Listokin, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

Every passing month of high interest rates increases the chances of massive job cuts and a devastating recession that still might come if the Fed maintains interest rates at their current levels for long enough. Recessions impose not only widespread short-term pain but also lifelong harms for many, as vulnerable populations and those who start their careers during a downturn never fully recover. Yet hiking interest rates is the centerpiece of U.S. inflation-fighting policy. When inflation is high, the Fed raises interest rates until inflation is tamed, regardless of the sacrifice that ensues. We call this inflation-fighting paradigm monetary primacy. …

Green, Or Greed? A Fresh Perspective On The Valuation Of Conservation Easements, Alan L. Feld, Theodore S. Sims, Jacob Nielson

Faculty Scholarship

Charitable contributions of "conservation easements" have since 1980 allowed high-income taxpayers to shelter income from taxation through overvalued deductions. Overvaluation has increased dramatically in the past 20 years: a 2016 study of all easement decisions since 1980 reported that while overvaluation had averaged by a factor of two before 1994, it averaged by a factor of ten for decisions between 1994 and 2016. SOI data disclose that aggregate easement contributions deducted on Schedule A grew from $2.26 billion in 2015 to $6.5 billion in 2018 (the most recent year available). A recent report by supporters of conservation easements acknowledges that …

Filing While Black: The Casual Racism Of The Tax Law, Steven Dean

Faculty Scholarship

The tax law's race-blind approach produces bad tax policy.' This Essay uses three very different examples to show how failing to openly and honestly address race generates bias, and how devastating the results can be.² Ignoring race does not solve problems; it creates them. ProPublica has shown, for example, that because of the perils of filing income taxes while Black, the five most heavily audited counties in the United States are Black and poor.

The racial bias long tolerated-and sometimes exploited-by tax scholars and policymakers affects all aspects of the tax law. In 1986, Sam Gilliam was denied tax …

Tax Deregulation, Steven Dean

Faculty Scholarship

Deregulation has played both the hero and the villain in recent years. This Article evaluates the impact of deregulation on what may be the single most economically important regulatory regime: the income tax. In order to accomplish this goal, it applies the concepts of fiscal arbitrage and compliance spirals to three deregulatory tax reforms. Compliance spirals describe an enforcement dynamic in which the regulator encourages compliance through a system of rewards for cooperation and punishment for noncooperation. Fiscal arbitrage describes policy measures that exploit cognitive biases and other anomalies to deliver political benefits by using minimal political capital. The combination …

The Incomplete Global Market For Tax Information, Steven Dean

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Taxation As A Global Socio-Legal Phenomenon, Allison Christians, Steven Dean, Diane Ring, Adam H. Rosenzweig

Faculty Scholarship

This essay makes a proposal that may not be controversial among those with a particular interest in international law, but may be less accepted among those primarily interested in tax law: that international social and institutional structures shape, and are shaped by, historical and contemporary domestic policy decisions. As a result, to incorporate these lessons, tax scholarship should turn to fields such as international relations, organizational theory, and political philosophy to provide a broader framework for understanding the rapid changes that are taking place in tax policy and politics in the United States and around the world.

Another Approach To Corporate Stock Basis, Alan L. Feld

Faculty Scholarship

Gordon Warnke's article makes a significant contribution. It helps to map a largely unexplored continent of tax law, the use and determination of adjusted basis in corporate shares in connection with certain nonrecognition transactions, recently elaborated in Reg. §1.358-2.2 The regulation provides guidance of particular relevance to the allocation of basis when the shareholder owns two or more batches of stock with differing adjusted bases. As Gordon's article makes clear, apparently simple tax law directives concerning the treatment of adjusted basis raise difficult questions and choices, often in common situations. In this article, I propose to make explicit some of …

Tax Shelters And The Code: Navigating Between Text And Intent, Steven Dean, Lawrence M. Solan

Faculty Scholarship

Tax shelters raise difficult problems of statutory interpretation. In her interesting article, Of Lenity, Chevron, and KPMG, Kristin Hickman explores one of them: the recent tendency of courts to apply the rule of lenity in civil cases, potentially leading to a narrow interpretation of the Code that would undermine efforts to collect the taxes that Congress intended to impose. In that article and in earlier work, she also discusses the importance of courts deferring to the IRS under the Chevron doctrine as a tool in collecting taxes. We agree both with Hickman's articulation and analysis of this problem. Here, we …

Consumer Law As Tax Alternative, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

Policymakers and scholars have in distributional conversations traditionally ignored consumer laws. Tax law dominates distributional conversations partly because legal rules are seen as less efficient and partly because consumer law research speaks to narrow and siloed contexts. Even millions of dollars in reduced credit card fees seem trivial compared to the trillion-dollar growth in income inequality that has sparked concern in recent decades. This Article is the first to synthesize the fragmented studies quantifying inefficiently higher consumer prices across diverse markets — called overcharge. These studies indicate that laws reducing overcharge could make a substantial reduction in inequality. Moreover, this …

Attractive Complexity: Tax Deregulation, The Check-The-Box Election, And The Future Of Tax Simplification, Steven Dean

Faculty Scholarship

Political failure has long been the scapegoat for the increasing complexity of the income tax. Over the last few decades, confusion over the meaning of the term simplification appears to have become a second important obstacle to creating simpler tax laws. Because some tax complexity is attractive to taxpayers, relying on taxpayer preferences to identify complexity and to guide simplification efforts has produced reforms and proposals that promise simplification but instead deliver pro-taxpayer deregulation that may cause more of society's resources to be devoted to paying, minimizing and collecting taxes rather than less. The check-the-box election, which provided taxpayers with …

When Fungible Portfolio Assets Meet: A Problem Of Tax Recognition, Alan L. Feld

Faculty Scholarship

A pervasive principle in calculating income for Federal tax purposes defers consideration of gain or loss in an investment asset until a recognition event occurs. An investor can watch the value of an investment in common stock rise over a considerable period of time without incurring any tax liability. Similarly, if the value declines, the investor does not take the loss into account. When the investor terminates the investment, the tax computation takes the net accumulated gain or loss into account at that time.

Discussion and controversy concerning this deferral principle, referred to as the realization or recognition requirement,^{1 …}

Artists, Art Collectors And Income Tax, Alan L. Feld

Faculty Scholarship

The federal income tax law treats artists and art collectors differently. Similar transactions concerning artworks produce disparate income tax results, depending on whether they involve the artist or the collector. On balance, these results seem to favor the collector over the artist. But notwithstanding the dismay of some artists and their advocates, the differences in result flow, in the main, from the differences in the source of the taxpayer's investment in the work.

The collector buys the work with after-tax income. Any gain is properly treated as an investment return and is eligible for capital gain benefits.' The collector, however, …

Deductibility Of Expenses For Child Care And Household Services: New Section 214, Alan L. Feld

Faculty Scholarship

It is increasingly common to find families composed of husband, wife and young children, where both husband and wife are gainfully employed. For some, this pattern is regarded as preferable to the older "ideal" family, where the husband was the sole breadwinner and the wife cared for the children, performed household chores and perhaps engaged in social or charitable activities. Where both spouses are gainfully employed, it is often necessary for the family to employ household help to care for the children and do the housework. These expenditures are "necessary" to the gainful employment of both spouses in the sense …