Law Commons^™

Relational Tax Planning Under Risk-Based Rules, Alex Raskolnikov

Faculty Scholarship

Risk-based rules are the tax system's primary response to aggressive tax planning. They usually grant benefits only to those taxpayers who accept risk of changes in market prices (market risk) or business opportunities (business risk). Attempts to circumvent these rules by hedging, contractual safeguards, and diversification are well-understood. The same cannot be said about a very different type of tax planning. Instead of reducing risk directly, some taxpayers change the nature of risk. They enter into informal, legally unenforceable agreements with contractual counterparties that are designed to eliminate market or business risk entirely. The new uncertainty these tax planners inevitably …

Retirement Security And Tax Policies: A Reply, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

In an Article published in the April 1987 issue of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, I urged that the three major components of this nation's retirement income system – Social Security, and income tax preferences for both employer-sponsored pension plans and individual retirement savings – be analyzed as a comprehensive national retirement income security program. I demonstrated that such an integrated view of this tripartite retirement security system reveals serious problems both with Social Security and with the generally applauded "tax expenditure" provisions for private pensions and individual savings. Viewing the three elements as a unified retirement security arrangement …

Troubled Marriage Of Retirement Security And Tax Policies, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

This Article concentrates on equitable and distributional aspects of the retirement security problem, although the unified view taken here seems essential to an adequate assessment of the fairness or efficacy either of the three components taken together or of any one of the three. Moreover, because tax legislation serves as the dominant public mechanism for implementing national retirement policy, whether through funding Social Security via the payroll tax or providing tax incentives for both private pensions and individual savings, a unified view of retirement security policy highlights interrelationships, confluences, and potential conflicts between retirement security and tax policy concerns.

This …