Tax Law Commons^™

Does Capital Bear The U.S. Corporate Tax After All? New Evidence From Corporate Tax Returns, Edward Fox

Articles

This article uses U.S. corporate tax return data to assess how government revenue would have changed if, over the period 1957–2013, corporations had been subject to a hypothetical corporate cash flow tax—that is, a tax allowing for the immediate deduction of investments in long-lived assets like equipment and structures—rather than the corporate tax regime actually in effect. Holding taxpayer behavior fixed, the data indicate actual corporate tax revenue over the most recent period (1995–2013) differed little from that under the hypothetical cash flow tax. This result has three important implications. First, capital owners appear to bear a large fraction of …

Back To Basics: Rethinking Normative Principles In International Tax, Shay Moyal

SJD Dissertations

This dissertation is comprised of the following articles:

• Moyal, Shay Shimon, Back to Basics: Rethinking Normative Principles in International Tax (May 11, 2019). The Tax Lawyer, Volume 73, Issue: 1 (Fall 2019), Also available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3386678 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3386678
• Moyal, Shay Shimon, Don't Stop the BEAT (February 03, 2020). “Don’t Stop the BEAT,” Tax Notes Federal, Feb. 3, 2020, pp. 721-735 and Tax Notes International, Feb. 3, 2020, pp. 533-547., also available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3539601
• Moyal, Shay Shimon, Section 267a and the Taxation of Hybrid Mismatches Under the Code (September 10, 2020). The Tax Lawyer, Vol. 74, No. 2, also …

Tim Edgar: The Accidental Comparatist, Kim Brooks

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This paper focuses on the contributions of Tim Edgar as a major comparative law scholar. It reviews the major debates and theoretical directions in comparative law scholarship and offers a case study of Edgar’s contributions in the light of the major debates in comparative law. Edgar’s development as a comparatist is traced through three defined phases. His identification of the policy problem to be resolved is highlighted as a major feature of his contribution.

The Ethical Tax Judge, Kim Brooks

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This chapter advances the claim that judges have an ethical obligation of competence that requires them to enhance their knowledge about language (in the context of statutory interpretation) and income tax law design and policy. It articulates some of the foundational understandings that support that competence and provides a simple hierarchy of approaches to interpreting income tax law. It concludes by contending that greater competence is not only more ethical but also advances other important societal goals fulfilled by the imposition of income tax systems.

The Village Of Billionaires: Fair Taxation And Redistribution Amid Relative And Absolute Poverty, Alexis Brassey, Henry Ordower

All Faculty Scholarship

Tax justice and principles underpinning the international tax regime are in vogue. The idea that companies and individuals need to pay their "fair share", not just in the domestic sense but also the international sense, is now a mainstream position. This paper explores the problems relating to what might constitute a "fair share" by setting out what is meant when this expression is used. A reasonable assumption is to consider taxation as the means by which the state funds public services and in some jurisdictions, contributes to greater equality within society. Those goals, however, give rise to competing claims. This …

Tax Policy And Our Democracy, Clinton G. Wallace

Michigan Law Review

Review of Anthony C. Infanti's Our Selfish Tax Laws: Toward Tax Reform That Mirrors Our Better Selves.

Taxing Residential Solar, Gregg Polsky, Ethan Yale

Scholarly Works

Residential solar systems are becoming commonplace in many regions of the United States. Use of such systems raises issues in tax doctrine and policy that are not well appreciated and have not yet been systematically analyzed. The goals of this article are threefold: (1) to identify the main issues and to organize them into a coherent framework, (2) to analyze the doctrinal and policy ramifications of present law, and (3) to suggest improvements to present law.

Feminist Statutory Interpretation, Kim Brooks

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Leading Canadian scholar Ruth Sullivan describes the act of statutory interpretation as a mix of art and archaeology. The collection, Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tax Opinions, affirms her assessment. If the act of statutory interpretation requires us to deploy our interdisciplinary talents, at least somewhat unmoored from the constraints of formal expressions of legal doctrine, why haven’t feminists been more inclined to write about statutory interpretation? Put another way, some scholars acknowledge that judges “are subtly influenced by preconceptions, endemic privilegings and power hierarchies, and prevailing social norms and ‘conventional’ wisdom.” Those influences become the background for how judges read legislation. …

Defining Fishing, The Slippery Seaweed Slope, Ross V. Acadian Seaplants Ltd., Rebecca P. Totten

Ocean and Coastal Law Journal

In Maine, the intertidal zone has seen many disputes over its use, access, and property rights. Recently, in Ross v. Acadian Seaplants, Ltd., the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, sitting as the Law Court, held that rockweed seaweed in the intertidal zone is owned by the upland landowner and is not part of a public easement under the public trust doctrine. The Court held harvesting rockweed is not fishing. This case will impact private and public rights and also the balance between the State's environmental and economic interests. This Comment addresses the following points: first, the characteristics of rockweed and the …

Luck And Tax Policy, Mark J. Mazur

Ohio Northern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Equitable Health Savings Accounts, Samuel Estreicher, Clinton G. Wallace

Faculty Publications

This Article offers the first comprehensive legal-policy critique of existing Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), arguing that the current approach is redistributively regressive, thus exacerbating inequality, and also fails to accomplish stated healthcare goals. We propose an alternative—Equitable Health Savings Accounts—which uses cash grants as a tool to address both of these problems. Equitable HSAs are a market-based social program that calibrates size and delivery of a government subsidy to help the least well off and to facilitate participation in healthcare markets. Equitable HSAs can serve as a model for using cash grants to bridge the gap between Republican social policy …

America's (D)Evolving Childcare Tax Laws, Shannon Weeks Mccormack

Articles

Proponents have touted the ability of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (the TCJA) — enacted in the twilight of 2017 — to help American working families. But while the TCJA expanded some benefits available to parents with dependent children, these parental tax benefits may be claimed regardless of whether or to what extent childcare costs are incurred to work outside the home. To help working parents with these costs (which are often their largest expense), Congress might have turned to two other mechanisms in the tax law — the “child and dependent care credit” and the “dependent care exclusion.” …

Book Review: International Tax Policy: Between Competition And Cooperation, Yariv Brauner

UF Law Faculty Publications

The author reviews International Tax Policy: Between Competition and Cooperation. By Tsilly Dagan. Cambridge Tax Law Series, 2018.

Eitc For All: A Universal Basic Income Compromise Proposal, Benjamin Leff

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Universal Basic Income ("UBI") is a concept that has recently begun to enter the popular political consciousness in the United States. It is defined as "a regular cash income paid to all, on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement." It is invoked for a wide variety of political and social purposes, but is almost always presented as radically different from existing governmental welfare and transfer systems. Once a UBI is disaggregated into discrete policy components, it is possible to imagine to what degree existing programs share the benefits (and detriments) of a UBI to a greater or …

A Human Capital Theory Of Alimony And Tax, Tessa R. Davis

Faculty Publications

The current taxation of alimony is a broken scheme. Severed from any strong theoretical mooring, it draws lines in the sand between property settlement, child support, and alimony. The lack of coherence between the substance of alimony in family law and the tax concept of alimony (“tax alimony”) could be justified on other policy grounds, however. Yet current law, which allows the payor a deduction under §215 and requires inclusion by the recipient per §71, is difficult to interpret, resulting in frequent litigation and costly noncompliance. In short, the current concept of tax alimony fails to satisfy any of the …

Improving Tax Administration Is The Optimal Way To Increase Budget Revenues (In The Example Of Taxing Individual Entrepreneurship In Uzbekistan), Sh.B. Egamkulov

Review of law sciences

In this article it is analyzed the development of tax administration, the profits of individuals and legal entities, the basis of taxation of individuals and legal entities, the basis of taxation of individual entrepreneurs, the incentives in the taxation.

The Economics Of American Higher Education In The New Gilded Age, Paul Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

Taxing Systemic Risk, Eric D. Chason

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

A tax on the harmful elements of finance—a tax on systemic risk—would raise revenue and also lower the likelihood of future crisis. Financial institutions, which pay the tax, would try to minimize its cost by lowering their systemic risk. In theory, a tax on systemic risk is perfect policy. In practice, however, this perfect policy is unattainable. Tax laws need clear definitions to be administrable. Our current understanding of systemic risk is too abstract and too metaphorical to serve as a target for taxation.

Despite the absence of a clear definition of systemic risk, academics and policy makers continue to …

End The Bloody Taxation: Seeing Red On The Unconstitutional Tax On Tampons, Victoria Hartman

Northwestern University Law Review

Why was there so much activism in the United States, and across the world, to end the tampon tax in 2016? This Note situates the movement to end the tampon tax within a broader history of feminist activism related to tampons and menstruation. It also analyzes the constitutional dimensions of the tax on feminine hygiene products and serves as a litigation guide for plaintiffs claiming that a state, city, or county sales tax on feminine hygiene products violates the Equal Protection Clause. Lastly, this Note demonstrates the hardships women face paying this tax and encourages state legislatures and city councils …

(Anti)Poverty Measures Exposed, Francine J. Lipman

Scholarly Works

Few economic indicators have more salience and pervasive financial impact on everyday lives in the United States than poverty measures. Nevertheless, policymakers, researchers, advocates, and legislators generally do not understand the details of poverty measure mechanics. These detailed mechanics shape and reshape poverty measures and the too often uninformed responses and remedies. This Article will build a bridge from personal portraits of families living in poverty to the resource allocations that failed them by exposing the specific detailed mechanics underlying the Census Bureau’s official (OPM) and supplemental poverty measures (SPM). Too often, when we confront the problem of poverty, the …

A Guide To The Guide To The Republican Better Way Plan, Alex Raskolnikov

Faculty Scholarship

This special Issue of the Columbia Journal of Tax Law is bound to have both an immediate impact and a lasting significance. The immediate impact is assured because the sole focus of this Issue is the tax plan proposed by the Congressional Republicans as part of their broad reform agenda called A Better Way: Our Vision For A Confident America. As this Issue goes to print, the Better Way Plan (or the Plan for short) is being debated in the White House, on Capitol Hill, in the press, in academic circles, think tanks, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and …

Heading Off A Cliff? The Tax Reform Man Cometh, And Goeth, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

The major tax policy challenge of the 21st century is the need to address the nation’s fiscal condition fairly and in a manner conducive to economic growth. But since California adopted Proposition 13 nearly forty years ago, antipathy to taxes has served as the glue that has held the Republican coalition together. Even though our taxes as a percentage of our economy are low by OECD standards and low by our own historical experience, anti-tax attitudes have become even more important for Republicans politically, since they now find it hard to agree on almost anything else. So revenue-positive, or even …

Government As Investor: The Case Of Immediate Expensing, Rebecca N. Morrow

Kentucky Law Journal

For more than sixty years, tax scholars have recognized conditions under which the government ceases to be a mere taxing entity—imposing a rate of tax on a business’s profits—and through the operation of tax law becomes more like an investment partner—contributing its fair share of capital to new investments and proportionately sharing in losses as well as gains. These conditions, which are satisfied by immediate expensing policies, are now common.

The investment partner analogy has been analyzed from the perspective of a taxpayer who, as a result of partnership-like treatment, enjoys returns on investment that are effectively tax-exempt. However, far …

Getting Back To The "Grassroots" Of Tax Administration: Because "We The People" Long For A Gathering Of American Eagles To Restore Trust In The Internal Revenue Service With A Rebuild Irs Initiative, Frank Wolpe

Akron Law Review

Like America, our Internal Revenue Service is a work in progress. Yet, for best results, it’s better to avoid thinking too much about what it is or is not! Instead, let’s think more about what the IRS ought to be! This Article thusly offers a realistic path forward with new choices for a local presence, which once again makes it taxpayer/customer-centric. For more effective tax administration, it also offers a return to something that inexcusably went missing in 1998: senior-executive “on-site oversight” of field operations.

If today’s Internal Revenue Service can be fairly described as an exploding volcano …

Northwestern, O'Bannon And The Future: Cultivating A New Era For Taxing Qualified Scholarships, Kathryn Kisska-Schulze, Adam Epstein

Akron Law Review

On March 26, 2014, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that Northwestern University’s scholarship football players were employees of the institution and could unionize and bargain collectively. From a federal income tax perspective, the significance of the NLRB decision—at that time—was that it could redefine the principle that select student-athletes are no longer unpaid amateurs receiving qualified scholarships, but instead are employees of their institutions, earning scholarship funds in exchange for services rendered as college athletes. Accordingly, a crucial question arising from the NLRB holding was whether the Internal Revenue Service could logically continue to treat qualified scholarships received …

Tax Cannibalization And State Government Tax Incentive Programs, David Gamage, Darien Shanske

Articles by Maurer Faculty

States and localities offer businesses an enormous amount of tax incentives to locate within their jurisdictions despite: 1) the mass of evidence that suggests that these incentives are not particularly effective and, 2) substantial doubts about their constitutionality.

In this essay, we develop a new critical perspective on state tax incentives. We argue that offering these incentives permits states to offer lower taxes to more mobile businesses while keeping their overall corporate tax rates high. This is arguably not the best choice for the states, but it is definitely not the best choice for the federal government. Because the states …

Reconciling The Premium Tax Credit: Painful Complications For Lower And Middle-Income Taxpayers, Francine J. Lipman, James E. Williamson

Scholarly Works

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) makes available to certain middle and lower-income individuals a refundable tax credit, the Premium Tax Credit (PTC), designed to help them pay the premiums on their qualified health care plans. To achieve Congress’s goal of making health insurance affordable, the PTC is most often provided directly to an individual’s insurance provider each month in advance of actually claiming the PTC on the individual’s year-end annual tax return. Of the almost twelve million individuals who have enrolled in health insurance through the federal and state health exchanges in 2015, 85% of these individuals …

The High Cost Of Transferring The Dream, Kim Brooks

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This paper is part of a larger project where I use the facts in tax decisions to reveal something about who we are. It looks through a small window into the lives of the people who find themselves caught between our collective and their individual expenditure aspirations. More specifically, it explores the circumstances in which individuals find that their outstanding tax debts pose a threat to their ability to maintain ownership of their home. In this paper I use the facts of tax cases for two ends. First, I am interested in disrupting legal knowledge hierarchies. We choose cases to …

Evaluating Beps: A Reconsideration Of The Benefits Principle And Proposal For Un Oversight, Reuven Avi-Yonah, Haiyan Xu

Articles

The Financial Crisis of 2008 and Great Recession that followed have exacerbated income inequality within and between countries. In the aftermath of the economic turbulence, politicians have turned their attention to the twin problems of individual tax evasion and corporate tax avoidance. U.S. legislators enacted the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FACTA), leading to the United States signing a series of Intergovernmental Agreements (IGAs) for the exchange of tax information. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) developed the Multilateral Agreement for Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters (MAATM) and initiated the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project to …

The Federal Government's Power To Restrict State Taxation, David Gamage, Darien Shanske

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This essay evaluates the limits on the U.S. federal government’s powers to restrict the taxing powers of state governments. The essay revisits earlier debates on this question, to consider the implications of the Supreme Court’s decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius and also academic research on the problem of tax cannibalization.