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Should Us Tax Law Be Constitutionalized? Centennial Reflections On Eisner V. Macomber (1920), Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Should Us Tax Law Be Constitutionalized? Centennial Reflections On Eisner V. Macomber (1920), Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Law & Economics Working Papers
The US Supreme Court last decided a federal tax case on constitutional grounds in 1920, a century ago. The case was Eisner v. Macomber, and the issue was whether Congress had the power under the Sixteenth Amendment (authorizing an income tax, 1913) to include stock dividends in the tax base. The Court answered no because “income” in the Sixteenth Amendment meant “the gain derived from capital, from labor, or from both combined.” A stock dividend, since it did not increase the wealth of the shareholder, was not “income.” Macomber was never formally overruled, and it is sometime still cited by …
The Death Of The Income Tax (Or, The Rise Of America’S Universal Wage Tax), Edward J. Mccaffery
The Death Of The Income Tax (Or, The Rise Of America’S Universal Wage Tax), Edward J. Mccaffery
Indiana Law Journal
The killing of the income tax has not been open and notorious: such is not the style of contemporary politics. As with other markers of progressive social policy—the promises of universal health care, Obamacare, come to mind6—the income tax is dying a death by stealth, albeit stealth played out in plain view. The plot lines of the tragedy are apparent. The individual “income” tax has been split in two. One tax, for the masses, is a simple, increasingly formless wage tax. This wage/income tax adds higher brackets onto the payroll tax, the model toward which the wage/income tax aims, to …