Law Commons^™

Business Lobbying As An Informational Public Good: Can Tax Deductions For Lobbying Expenses Promote Transparency?, Michael Halberstam, Stuart G. Lazar

Journal Articles

The view that “lobbying is essentially an informational activity” has persistently served the suggestion that lobbying provides a public good by educating legislators about policy and the consequences of legislation.

In this article, we link a proposed tax reform with a substantive disclosure requirement to promote the kind of “information subsidy” that serves the public interest, while mitigating – at least to some extent – the distortion that may result from the imbalance of financial resources on the business side and other institutional contraints identified in the literature. We argue that corporate lobbying should be encouraged – by allowing business …

Taxing Social Enterprise, Lloyd Histoshi Mayer

Journal Articles

The fairly strict divide in the United States between for-profit and nonprofit forms presents a quandary for many entrepreneurs who want to combine doing good with doing well. On the one hand, for-profits offer great flexibility and access to capital and so attract entrepreneurs who would like to take advantage of the ability of for-profits to scale up rapidly to meet growing demand. At the same time, however, for-profit forms also limit entrepreneurs’ ability to engage in philanthropy, due to the fiduciary duties managers owe to the equity holders. On the other hand, nonprofits offer their founders the freedom to …

Revisiting The Tax Treatment Of Citizens Abroad: Reconciling Principle And Practice, Michael Kirsch

Journal Articles

In an increasingly mobile world, the taxation of citizens living abroad has taken on increased importance. Recent international administrative developments — most notably, the weakening of foreign bank secrecy and expansion of global information sharing norms — have further raised the profile of this issue. While U.S. law traditionally has taxed U.S. citizens living abroad in the same general manner as citizens living in the United States, a number of scholars have proposed abandoning the use of citizenship as a jurisdictional basis to tax. In its place, they would apply residence-based principles — i.e., exercising full taxing rights over U.S. …