Law Commons^™

Pandemics, Paid Sick Leaves, And Tax Institutions, Alex Zhang

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

The COVID-19 pandemic is currently ravaging the world, and the United States has been largely unsuccessful at containing the coronavirus. One long-standing policy failure stands out as having exacerbated the pandemic in our country: the lack of a national mandate of paid sick leaves, without which workers face financial and workplace-cultural pressures to attend work while sick, thus spreading the virus to their fellow employees and the public at large.

This Article provides the blueprint for a national, subsidized mandate of paid sick leaves and two additional insights about our tax institutions as mechanisms of effectuating broader societal goals. It …

International Vertical Equity, Adam H. Rosenzweig

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

This Essay considers the role of equity in the international tax context. While much has been written about the importance of equity in the domestic context, the conversation around international tax has failed to recognize the importance of the concept of equity. While tax policy in the domestic context has historically prioritized equity over efficiency, tax policy in the international context has not equally prioritized equity, at least not in the same way. In particular, this Essay addresses this question by revisiting the classic and dominant theory of equity in international tax policy, inter-nation equity, and its traditional roots in …

The Spurious Allure Of Pass-Through Parity, Karen C. Burke

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

In 2017, Congress reduced tax rates on both corporate and noncorporate income. The drafters invoked the concept of pass-through parity to justify lower rates on noncorporate business income, resulting in a new and highly controversial deduction for pass-through owners under § 199A. The concept of pass-through parity conflates equitable treatment of different entity forms with equitable distribution of the ultimate tax burden among labor and capital. The flawed rationale for § 199A may be viewed as an attempt to preserve the pre-2017 preference for pass-through income; conceptually, the advantage of lower corporate rates is limited to the availability of a …

Do Tax Judges Think About The Economy?, Orli Oren-Kolbinger

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

Does the macroeconomic environment affect judicial decisions and thereby shape the law? Even though the normative significance of understanding judicial decision-making is undeniable, empirical research into how judges make decisions is woefully incomplete. This is the first Article to empirically examine the stabilizing fiscal potential of judicial decisions in tax disputes. In this Article, I use empirical methods to test whether macroeconomic conditions—namely, the business cycle—affect the outcomes of judicial decisions in tax cases. Economic theory prescribes either an anti-cyclical response to the business cycle or no response at all. I test this hypothesis with a novel dataset constructed of …

Difficulty Of Care: Aligning Tax And Health Care Policy For Family Caregiving, Christine S. Speidel

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

In the United States millions of people live with disabilities, many of whom require assistance with activities of daily life to remain in their homes and communities. However, financial support for this assistance is limited. Many caregivers forgo working outside the home in order to provide care to a family member. And while state and federal programs provide some compensation for caregiving, caregivers frequently face problems including poverty, lack of health insurance, lack of Social Security and Medicare credits, and lack of retirement savings. Our nation’s paltry support for caregiving threatens the practical ability of people with disabilities to choose …

Unsophisticated Taxpayers, Rules Versus Standards, And Form Versus Substance, Emily Cauble

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

Many features of tax law can simplify the law in some senses for some taxpayers but make it more complex in other ways and for other taxpayers. This Essay focuses, in particular, on design choices that make the form of a transaction more determinative of tax consequences than its substance or that make tax law more rule like and less standard based. While such measures may simplify matters for taxpayers who contemplate tax law prior to acting (by making tax consequences more predictable), they can make the law more complex for taxpayers who do not attempt to ascertain the content …