Tax Law Commons^™

Saving The Farm Or Giving Away The Farm: A Critical Analysis Of The Capital Gains Tax Preferences, Phyllis C. Taite

Faculty Articles

Over the years the topic of capital gain preferences has been thoroughly debated. Discussions range between whether the tax rates on capital gains should be raised, reduced, or repealed. Other discussions have centered on whether capital gains has an effect on the economy, and if so, how the research supports those assertions. It would be difficult to cover all aspects of the issues associated with capital gains taxes in one article; therefore this discussion will focus on capital gains as applied to individual income taxes. The capital gains tax has been criticized for the questionable effect it has on the …

Delegating Tax, James R. Hines Jr., Kyle D. Logue

Michigan Law Review

Congress delegates extensive and growing lawmaking authority to federal administrative agencies in areas other than taxation, but tightly limits the scope of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Treasury regulatory discretion in the tax area, specifically not permitting these agencies to select or adjust tax rates. This Article questions why tax policy does and should differ from other policy areas in this respect, noting some of the potential policy benefits of delegation. Greater delegation of tax lawmaking authority would allow administrative agencies to apply their expertise to fiscal policy and afford timely adjustment to changing economic circumstances. Furthermore, delegation of the …

Libertarianism And The Charitable Tax Subsidies, Miranda Perry Fleischer

Faculty Scholarship

Tax scholarship is largely silent about the interaction between libertarian principles and the structure of our tax system. If all taxation is indeed slavery, as Nozick suggested, why bother analyzing libertarianism for insights into our tax system? This dismissal, however, ignores the diversity of libertarian thought. To that end, this Article mines the nuances of libertarian theory for insights into one feature of our tax system: the charitable tax subsidies. One strand of libertarianism suggests that the charitable tax subsidies are in and of themselves illegitimate. Yet several other understandings of libertarianism see a role for the state to engage …

Expanding The Renewable Energy Industry Through Tax Subsidies Using The Structure And Rationale Of Traditional Energy Tax Subsidies, Blake Harrison

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Just as the government invested in oil and gas, it must now invest in new energy sources. In a sense, Americans need history to repeat itself. This Note suggests that Congress should amend the United States Tax Code to further subsidize the renewable energy industry. Congress should use subsidies historically available to the oil and gas industries as a model in its amendments. These subsidies serve as a model for promoting the renewable energy industry because such subsidies were fundamental in facilitating the oil and gas industries’ dominance today. Ultimately, Congress must further subsidize the renewable energy industry to avoid …

Does Federal Spending "Coerce" States? Evidence From State Budgets, Brian Galle

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Schedularity In U.S. Income Taxation And Its Effect On Tax Distribution, Henry Ordower

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

What A History Of Tax Withholding Tells Us About The Relationship Between Statutes And Constitutional Law, Anuj C. Desai

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Look Away Dixieland: The South And The Federal Income Tax, Robin L. Einhorn

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Rise And Fall Of The Consumption Tax, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

The year 1974 was an eventful one in U.S. history. For the first time, a president resigned under threat of impeachment. Watergate and the Vietnam War shook Americans’ faith in their government. The economy was reeling from the first oil embargo, and the United States’ prospects seemed bleak. In that context, Professor William Andrews of Harvard Law School published an article that would revolutionize tax scholarship. Against the backdrop of widespread dissatisfaction with the government in general and the income tax in particular, Andrews suggested replacing the income tax with a consumption tax. That suggestion was ironic for anyone familiar …

International Tax Policy: The Counter-Story Presented By The Brics, Kim Brooks

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This chapter focuses on the international tax policy directions of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS). The BRICS countries present something of a counter-story to the narrative that international tax law has harmonized. These five countries, major economic and trade players in the world but not members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), have developed their international tax policy with an eye to the approach suggested by the OECD, but not necessarily in conformity with its strictures. This chapter explores the international tax policy directions of the BRICS jurisdictions under the familiar, broad heads of …

(Un)Appealing Deference To The Tax Court, Leandra Lederman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The U.S. Tax Court (Tax Court), which hears the vast majority of litigated federal tax cases, occupies an unusual place in the federal government. It is a federal court located outside of the judicial branch, but its decisions are appealable to the federal courts of appeals. This odd structure, coupled with the court's history as an independent agency in the executive branch, can give rise to important questions, such as the standard of review that should apply to its decisions. In particular, should the courts of appeals treat Tax Court decisions the same as those of district courts in tax …

The Pay Or Play Penalty Under The Affordable Care Act: Emerging Issues, Kathryn L. Moore

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The Affordable Care Act does not require that employers provide employees with health care coverage. It does, however, impose an excise tax on large employers that fail to offer their employees affordable employer-sponsored health care coverage. The excise tax, commonly referred to as a “pay-or-play penalty,” was scheduled to go into effect beginning in 2014. The United States Treasury Department (“Treasury”), however, has delayed enforcement of the penalty until 2015 for employers with 100 or more full-time employees, and until 2016 for employers with 50 to 99 employees.

Implementation of the pay-or-play penalty has given rise to a host of …

The Supreme Court's 2012 Tax Cases: Formalism Trumps Pragmatism And Good Sense, William Neil Brooks, Kim Brooks

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The Supreme Court of Canada released decisions in four cases in the 2012 year. We argue that each illustrates the Court's formalistic approach to interpreting tax legislation. Each of the following four cases is evaluated in turn. Canada v Craig relates to the circumstances under which a taxpayer can offset losses incurred in a farming business against income earned from a completely different source. Fundy Settlement v Canada required determining the residency of a trust for tax purposes. Canada v GlaxoSmithKline Inc. focused on the circumstances to be taken into account in determining an arm's-length price in the transfer pricing …

Solving Charity Failures, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

“Crowdfunding” is a way of using the Internet to raise money by asking the public to contribute to a project. In the past, asking a large number of people to contribute small amounts of money to a project was expensive and inefficient for most organizations and individuals. By greatly reducing transaction costs, crowdfunding enables anyone to inexpensively and efficiently seek small contributions to a project. While crowdfunding is a new model of fundraising, it has already transformed funding for the arts. For example, the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter distributed more than forty million dollars to the creators of almost seventy-five hundred …

Exploding Wealth Inequalities: Does Tax Policy Promote Social Justice Or Social Injustice, Phyllis C. Taite

Faculty Articles

This essay discusses how tax policies work in concert to contribute to the wealth and income inequality that disadvantage the poor and middle class in favor of the wealthy. While there is current and past discourse on wealth and income inequality, and impact of the same, as well as discussions of multiple causes of wealth and income inequality, there is little discussion on how various tax policies work together as a common force to perpetuate income and economic inequality. This Essay briefly discussed how certain tax policies work in concert to systematically shift wealth to the wealthiest taxpayers. This social …

Putting The Reign Back In Sovereign, Allison Christians

Pepperdine Law Review

In its first term, the Obama administration enacted two pieces of legislation, each designed to protect an increasingly vulnerable income tax base, and each of which had the potential to set a new and unprecedented course for no less than the regulation of the global economy by the nation-state. The first, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), sought to end global tax evasion through tax havens. The second, a little-noticed two-page addendum to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank), sought to end the contribution of American multinationals to corruption in governance by codifying the transparency …

Tax Advice For The Second Obama Administration, Paul L. Caron

Pepperdine Law Review

Twenty-five of the nation’s leading tax academics, practitioners, journalists, and public intellectuals gathered in Malibu, California on the Friday before President Obama’s second inauguration to plead for tax reform. The papers published in this issue of the Pepperdine Law Review provide very different prescriptions for America’s tax ills. But there is a unanimous diagnosis that the country’s tax system is sick indeed. A re-elected president’s inauguration offers a particularly propitious moment to put politics aside and embark on a treatment plan. If our lawmakers are interested in healing our tax wounds, the ideas presented in these pages offer a good …

Cracking The Tax Codes: How State Tax Laws Influence The Number Of Manufacturing Jobs Within Their Borders, Nick Lorenson

Political Science Theses and Capstones

With the recent economic downturn, jobs have been at the forefront of people’s concerns. Policy makers in every state have promised their constituents new jobs. Of particular importance are high paying jobs. Manufacturing jobs tend to be a well-paying and highly sought after form of employment. However, in recent decades, the percentage of manufacturing jobs has been declining in the United States. Also, manufacturing facilities have shown an increased likelihood of relocating to different states. I theorize that manufacturing facilities relocating and expanding in different states is primarily due to state tax policies. This phenomenon has increased within recent years …

Settlement, Compromise, And Forgiveness In Canadian Income Tax Law, Colin Jackson

LLM Theses

This thesis looks at legal mechanisms allowing the non-collection of tax debts in the tax systems of Canada and the United States. The goal is to shed light on the choices made in Canada's tax collection system by juxtaposing it with the American system. The comparison reveals differences in the ways in which the two jurisdictions allow taxpayers to participate in the tax system and differences in how the two jurisdictions choose to make decisions about the forgiveness of tax debts. Although Canada has generally rejected the idea of compromise within the tax system, there is a tax policy case …

Accepting The Limits Of Tax Law And Economics, Alex Raskolnikov

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores the limits of tax law and economics, attributing them to the unique complexity of the tax optimization problem. Designers of the optimal tax system must account for the impossibility of deterring socially undesirable behavior, provide for redistribution, and minimize social costs on the basis of assumptions that are laden with deeply contested value judgments, pervasive empirical uncertainty, or both. Given these challenges, it is hardly surprising that economic theory has a much weaker connection to the content of our tax laws and their enforcement than it does to the content and enforcement of many other legal regimes. …

Death, Taxes, And Property (Rights): Nozick, Libertarianism, And The Estate Tax, Jennifer Bird-Pollan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The primary purpose of this Article is to dispute the moral claims to post-death property rights made by libertarians when they argue against the estate tax. As I will show later in this Article, my argument does not necessarily entail enacting an estate tax, nor does it require a particular level of tax. I am merely trying to demonstrate that those who argue that the estate tax is an immoral violation of the private property rights of the deceased are mistaken. This is not to say that the estate of the deceased should necessarily pass to the government. It is …

Technological Innovation, International Competition, And The Challenges Of International Income Taxation, Michael J. Graetz, Rachael Doud

Faculty Scholarship

Because of the importance of technological innovation to economic growth, nations strive to stimulate and attract the research and development ("R&D") that leads to that innovation and to make themselves hospitable environments for the holding of intellectual property ("IP"). Tax policies have taken center stage in their efforts to accomplish these goals and to capture a share of the income from technological innovations.

Designing cost-effective methods of supporting technological innovations has, however, become substantially more difficult as the world economy has become more interconnected. Where R&D is performed and where income is earned change in response to the nature and …

Fitness Tax Credits: Costs, Benefits, And Viability, Daniel M. Reach

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

As the number of overweight and obese Americans rises, it becomes increasingly clear that Americans need further incentives to stimulate lasting lifestyle changes. Tax incentives focused on exercise, which have been largely unexplored to this point, are an effective response to the growing obesity problem in the United States that would largely avoid the political opposition that tax policies focused on diet have encountered. In addition, they would also provide a more palatable solution for the taxpayer beneficiaries with a relatively low impact on government revenues. Viable tax incentives to encourage greater fitness include tax credits and sales tax breaks, …

Islamic Law Meets Erisa: How America's Private Pension System Unintentionally Discriminates Against Muslims And What To Do About It, Beverly I. Moran

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article asks whether Muslims whose religious beliefs prevent investment in their employers’ private pension plans have a right to religious accommodation. This is a real issue for a growing part of the population whose spiritual lives are governed by rules that prohibit the giving or taking of interest. As one might expect, the investments available through most American pension plans involve some aspect of interest making those investments unsuitable retirement vehicles for devote Muslims. Consequently, in order to secure their retirement income, Muslims are faced with either violating their religious beliefs, losing years of investment opportunity as they wait …

The Case For Tradable Tax Credits, Clint Wallace

Faculty Publications

This note argues that tradable tax credits offer advantages as compared to other mechanisms the federal government can use to affect social and economic policy. Policymakers should consider the tradable tax credit as a potentially desirable form of tax incentive, rather than a necessity of political compromise as was the case in the enactment of existing tradable credits. First, the note establishes that tradable tax credits can be the economic equivalent of direct spending programs and of refundable tax credits. Next, the note examines a limited but significant set of circumstances in which the tradable tax credit can offer efficiency …

The Effect Of U.S. State Taxes On State Economic Prosperity, Casey Dainsberg

Political Science Theses and Capstones

Policy makers today are faced with trying to create solutions for economic troubles that become increasingly more complex and foreboding. Tax cuts and tax hikes are proposed and considered as possible solutions to various economic problems. However, the question still remains regarding which policies are most effective. The purpose of this research is to asses these competing claims. It seeks to find evidence that will shed light on one of these views. I have done this by accumulating tax and economic data from the fifty U.S. States between the years 2001-2009. Previous research has concluded that taxes do affect the …

The Meaning Of 'Enterprise,' 'Business' And 'Business Profits' Under Tax Treaties And Eu Tax Law (Canada), Kim Brooks

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This chapter explores the meaning of business as it is used in Canadian income tax law given the four purposes that concept serves.

Taxation As Regulation: Carbon Tax, Health Care Tax, Bank Tax And Other Regulatory Taxes, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

This paper addresses three questions: 1. Is regulation a legitimate goal for taxation? 2. Which tax is best suited for regulation? 3. Would it be better to allocate just one goal per tax among the major taxes (individual and corporate income tax and VAT)? It then analyzes the proposed bank tax and the enacted health care tax as regulatory taxes, and concludes that the first is desirable (as is a carbon tax) but the second is not.

From Programmatic Reform To Social Science Research: The National Tax Association And The Promise And Perils Of Disciplinary Encounters, Ajay K. Mehrotra, Joseph J. Thorndike

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This article uses the history of the National Tax Association (NTA), the leading twentieth-century organization of tax professionals, to strengthen our empirical understanding of the disciplinary encounter between law and the social sciences. Building on existing sociolegal scholarship, this article explores how the NTA embodied tax law's ambivalent historical interaction with public economics. Since its founding in 1907, the NTA has changed dramatically from an eclectic and catholic organization of tax professionals with a high public profile to an insular, scholarly association of mainly academic public finance economists. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative historical evidence, we contend that …

The Political Economy Of Taxation: A Critical Review Of A Classic, Nancy Staudt

Faculty Working Papers

This book review reexamines Henry Simons famous contribution to the tax policy literature, "Personal Income Taxation: The Definition of Income as Problem in Fiscal Policy" (1938). It argues that while Professor Simons was concerned with tax fairness and the redistribution of income, he adopted a definition of income that worked to undermine the interests of many of the poor individuals in society that he sought to support.