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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Case For An Income Tax, Alan Gunn Jan 1979

The Case For An Income Tax, Alan Gunn

Journal Articles

Recent studies by the US Treasury Department and the Meade Committee in Britain have one thing in common. They recommend a progressive tax on personal consumption as an alternative to the income tax and discuss of the practical problems of substituting consumption for income as the tax base. These studies suggest that replacing the income tax with an expenditure tax is now being considered a serious possibility. Advocates for the expenditure tax base their arguments on considerations of equity, administrative convenience and economic efficiency. The article examines the merits of these arguments, with a focus on four important non-economic issues …


Accelerated Depreciation—Tax Expenditure Or Proper Allowance For Measuring Net Income?, Douglas A. Kahn Jan 1979

Accelerated Depreciation—Tax Expenditure Or Proper Allowance For Measuring Net Income?, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

Since the 1950s, it has become fashionable to attack various provisions of the Internal Revenue Code by calling them "subsidies" rather than "proper" means of measuring taxable income. These "subsidies" through Code provisions have come to be referred to as "tax expenditures," a term coined by Professor Stanley Surrey in a speech he made as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Policy on November 15, 1967. In that speech, Professor Surrey stated that our tax system often deliberately departs "from accepted concepts of net income," so that by granting exemptions, deductions, and credits that are not appropriate to an …