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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Charitable Continuum, Eric Kades
The Charitable Continuum, Eric Kades
Faculty Publications
There are powerful fairness and efficiency arguments for making charitable donations to soup kitchens 100% deductible. These arguments have no purchase for donations to fund opulent church organs, yet these too are 100% deductible under the current tax code. This stark dichotomy is only the tip of the iceberg. Looking at a wider sampling of charitable gifts reveals a charitable continuum. Based on sliding scales for efficiency, multiple theories of fairness, pluralism, institutional competence and social welfare dictate that charitable deductions should in most cases be fractions between zero and one. Moreover, the Central Limit Theorem strongly suggests that combining …
Democracy Avoidance In Tax Lawmaking, Clint G. Wallace
Democracy Avoidance In Tax Lawmaking, Clint G. Wallace
Faculty Publications
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was the most significant tax law in more than three decades, but the strategy for getting it enacted included a variety of maneuvers to avoid public scrutiny. As a result, many taxpayers did not know how they would be affected until they filed their own tax returns more than a year later. This Article identifies this lack of transparency as part of a persistent pathology of avoiding and constraining democratic inputs and responsiveness in U.S. federal tax lawmaking. Indeed, some scholars and policy makers have sought to channel tax lawmaking away from democratically grounded …
Wage Enslavement: How The Tax System Holds Back Historically Disadvantaged Groups Of Americans, David Gamage, Goldburn P. Maynard Jr.
Wage Enslavement: How The Tax System Holds Back Historically Disadvantaged Groups Of Americans, David Gamage, Goldburn P. Maynard Jr.
Faculty Publications
Despite the importance placed on equality of opportunity within United States political culture, the existing tax system inhibits historically disadvantaged groups from building wealth or catching up with historically more privileged groups. This effectively then traps many members of historically disadvantaged groups into a continued cycle of dependence on tax-disfavored wage and salary income, a phenomenon that we metaphorically label as “wage enslavement.” This Article explains this phenomenon and then calls for reform.
Wealth Transfer Tax Planning After The Tax Cuts And Jobs Act, Jeffrey A. Maine, John A. Miller
Wealth Transfer Tax Planning After The Tax Cuts And Jobs Act, Jeffrey A. Maine, John A. Miller
Faculty Publications
On December 17, 2017, Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). Among its many impacts, the TCJA increased the inflation-adjusted estate tax basic exclusion amount to $10,000,000 on a temporary basis. This has dramatic implications for many existing and future estate plans, including a major crossover impact on income tax planning. In this Article, we explain the operation of the federal wealth transfer taxes (the estate tax, the gift tax, and the generation skipping transfer tax) in the wake of the TCJA and dissect the basic tax planning techniques for wealth transmission. The overall design of this Article …