Law Commons^™

The Meaning Of Capital In The Twenty-First Century, Edward J. Mccaffery

Edward J McCaffery

America is on a path towards a level of both wealth and income inequality unparalleled in recorded history. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century summarizes and conveys the work of Piketty and many co-authors, over many decades, looking at the structure of income and wealth inequality across many nations and centuries. This review essay builds on Piketty’s ambitions as well as his data, in order to put forth a better solution: one that accepts and even embraces the facts of unequal ownership of capital, but changes the social meaning of those facts to avoid the social harms that follow …

The Death Of The Income Tax (Or, The Rise Of America's Universal Wage Tax), Edward J. Mccaffery

Edward J McCaffery

In 1913, with whispers of progressive politics in the air, Americans ratified a Constitutional amendment allowing for a tax on “all incomes, from whatever source derived.”This set the stage for the individual income tax, a tax meant to fall on wealth and the wealthy. It was a small step, but it was a step. Capital and labor, wealth and wages, would each be paying the price of civilization. The corporate income and gift and estate taxes soon formed a troika of wealth taxes, though the individual income tax fell on upper-income wages as well.

Things changed. Over a century later, …

Taxing Wealth Seriously, Edward J. Mccaffery

Edward J McCaffery

The social and political problems of wealth inequality in America are severe and getting worse. A surprise is that the U.S. tax system, as is, is a significant cause of these problems, not a cure for them. The tax-law doctrines that allow those who already have financial wealth to live, luxuriously and tax-free, or to pass on their wealth tax-free to heirs, are simple. The applicable legal doctrines have been in place for nearly a century under the income tax, the primary social tool for addressing matters of economic inequality. The analytic pathways to reform are easy to see once …

It's Tax Not Trade (Stupid), Edward J. Mccaffery

Edward J McCaffery

Globalization, trade and other free market policies increase wealth. But the gains from trade are not being evenly spread among all citizens. People and politicians rage against foreigners. But it is the United States tax system, not trade, that ought to change, and wealthy Americans, not workers world-wide, who should be sharing the wealth. A nd it is the form of tax, not just its rate structure, that must reform, so that capital at last bears a meaningful share of the burden.

Taxing Wealth Seriously, Edward J. Mccaffery

Edward J McCaffery

The Meaning Of Capital In The 21st Century, Edward Mccaffery

Edward J McCaffery

Behavioral Public Finance, Edward J. Mccaffery

Edward J McCaffery

These are slides from a presentation to the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research, Squaw Valley Conference, May, 2008 (at which event Michael Jensen got me to agree to post these slides as a pdf on SSRN . . . ). The task is to give an overview of what I hope to be an emerging field of behavioral public finance. Behavioral finance, as per Barberis and Thaler 2003 (and others), consists of two parts: (1) individual level heuristics and biases, which can lead to sub-optimal (inconsistent) judgment and decision-making, and (2) institutional arbitrage mechanisms. In private finance and …

Comments On Liebman And Zeckhauser, Simple Humans, Complex Insurance, Subtle Subsidies, Edward J. Mccaffery

Edward J McCaffery

These are brief comments on an excellent paper by Jeffrey Liebman and Richard Zeckhauser, prepared for a conference sponsored by the Urban Institute and Brookings on tax and health care policy. Liebman and Zeckhauser summarize the complexities involved in making optimal health insurance decisions, and offer generally cautionary notes about conflating these with tax law (a theme of the conference). Most importantly, Liebman and Zeckhauser suggest a positive role for employers in health care and insurance decisions, as better setters or framers of choice sets—witness 401(k) plans. In this Commentary, I applaud Leibman and Zeckhauser’s general work and particular observation, …

Good Hybrids/Bad Hybrids, Edward J. Mccaffery

Edward J McCaffery

Hybrid income-consumption taxes seek to tax some but not all savings, the treatment of savings being the principal difference between an income and a consumption tax. Some hybrids, however, simply move the tax system towards a prepaid consumption or wage tax; others, by allowing arbitrage, risk making all taxation voluntary. A consistent, progressive postpaid consumption tax, in contrast, gets matters just right, by design: it allows ordinary savings, for times of retirement or medical or educational needs, to lower the burden of taxation, while falling on the yield to savings when it is used to elevate lifestyles. It is, in …

A New Understanding Of Tax, Edward J. Mccaffery

Edward J McCaffery

A great deal and possibly all of the mind-numbing complexity of America’s largest and least popular tax follows from the decision to have a progressive personal income tax. Proponents wanted an individual income tax notwithstanding — indeed, in large part because of — such a tax’s “double taxation” of savings. This double-tax argument is an analytic point generally attributed to Mill’s classic 1848 treatise, Principles of Political Economy. Historically, much of the support for the Sixteenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, came from Southern and Midwestern, progressive, agricultural interests, who wanted, in general, to implement a redistributive tax and, in particular, …