Tax Law Commons^™

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 …

Debt And Taxes, David Hasen

UF Law Faculty Publications

The federal income tax conceptualizes the standard loan transaction as an exchange of cash for promises to pay interest and to repay the amount borrowed by the term. This formulation is subtly wrong in ways that have led to a weaker foundation for existing tax rules than they merit. Conceptualizing loans instead as closely akin to leases places most of the tax rules for debt on sounder footing because it clarifies that the consideration paid for the use of the loan proceeds is interest. If interest is the cost of the use of money, then simple borrowing is a fully-paid-for …

Taxing Employers For Imposing Mandatory Arbitration, Class Action Waiver, And Nondisclosure Of Dispute Provisions, Rebecca N. Morrow

SMU Law Review

Employers impose coercive dispute resolution terms on their employees more frequently, more broadly, and with greater legal success than ever before. Recent survey data indicates that mandatory employment arbitration provisions bind more than 60 million American workers—over half of the U.S. private-sector nonunion workforce. Employment class action waivers bind nearly 25 million American workers. In 2018, the Supreme Court held 5–4 that mandatory arbitration provisions and class action waivers imposed by employers on their employees do not violate the National Labor Relations Act. These terms prohibit employees from exposing employer wrongdoing in open court, bar employees with valid wage and …

Putting Paper To Pen: Generation Juul's Case For Harm Reduction, Liz Emanuel

Indiana Law Journal

Part I of this Note soberly explores and delineates the perceived and real threats of vaping for America’s youth, concluding with an analysis of the socioeconomic and developmental health effects of nicotine addiction. Part II delves into the federal government’s response to e-cigarettes as well as the powers and limitations of federal regulation under the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) “Deeming Rule” and the potential effectiveness of an increase in the national tobacco purchase age or a federal ban on flavored vaping products. Part III discusses the realistic benefits of taking a harm reduction approach to youth vaping in the …

A Hebrew Republic Of Taxation?: Henry George’S Single Tax, Hebraic Law, And Unearned Income, Joshua Cutler

Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Can millennia-old religious ideas offer insights into modern tax law? I explore this question through the hugely popular, yet largely forgotten, tax movement of political economist Henry George. Seeking to explain why poverty always seemed to increase along with progress, George proposed that, as societies advanced, land owners were able to capture an increasing share of unearned wealth. To remedy this, George proposed a “Single Tax” on the unearned income from land. George’s tax movement gained popularity largely because it was founded on widely-held ideas originating in the Hebrew Bible. Yet, the religious foundation of George’s tax movement has been …

Taxing Capital In The Age Of Intangibles, Eurallyah Akinyi, Dan Ciuriak

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The rise of the intangibles economy has led to a significant erosion of corporate tax revenue in the innovation-intensive advanced economies, even as the share of national income flowing to capital rose. For developing countries, the erosion is worse and comes on top of substantial erosion of corporate tax revenues from the tangibles economy due to weak tax administration and corruption. In this paper, we take up the questions of how big is the taxing problem that the intangibles economy has raised, and whose problem is it. Further, we consider how well the proposed OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework measures up in …

Effective Taxation In Africa: Confronting Systemic Vulnerability Through Inclusive Global Tax Governance, Okanga Ogbu Okanga, Lyla Latif

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Implicit within the African fiscal architecture are embedded vulnerabilities to exogenous factors which challenge their domestic revenue mobilization (DRM) strategies. These DRM challenges are attributable to asymmetrical power relationships that exist within the international tax regime (ITR). The rules governing international taxation have largely been devised by developed countries resonating their own economic purposes, resulting in a regressive relationship that overlooks African perspectives in the creation of tax norms. Consequently, policymaking, and scholarship have focused extensively on curbing these power asymmetries that have resulted in vulnerable African tax systems. Continental and domestic approaches are now aligned towards fostering reform of …

Trust And Efficiency In Tax Administration: The Silent Role Of Policy-Based Legitimate Expectation In Nigeria, Okanga Ogbu Okanga

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The interaction between tax administration, discretion, and legitimate expectation has been widely explored. However, the subject has traditionally been approached from the perspective of legality and deeply focussed on how courts adjudicate cases bordering on the frustration of legitimate expectation by tax authorities. This is unsurprising, given that legitimate expectation evolved as a judicial remedy to check administrative unfairness and to provide certainty and trust in public administration. Cases show that this remedy is rarely accorded by the courts, which makes its efficiency questionable. Using Nigeria as a case study, this doctrinal paper explores the prospects of taking an alternative …

Stanley Surrey, The Code And The Regime, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Nir Fishbien

Articles

Stanley Surrey (1910-1984) was arguably the most important tax scholar of his generation. Surrey was a rare combination of an academic (Berkeley and Harvard law schools, 1947-1961 and 1969-1981) and a government official (Tax Legislative Counsel, 1942-1947; Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy, 1961-1969). Today he is mostly remembered for inventing the concept of tax expenditures and the tax expenditure budget. This paper will argue that while Surrey was influential in shaping domestic tax policy for a generation and had an impact after his death on the Tax Reform Act of 1986, his longest lasting contributions were in shaping the international …

Stanley Surrey, The 1981 Us Model, And The Single Tax Principle, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

2021 marks the fortieth anniversary of the 1981 US Model Tax Treaty as well as the fifth anniversary of the 2016 US Model Tax Treaty. The first author has repeatedly argued that the 1981 Model gave life to the single tax principle (‘STP’). The 2016 Model updates effectively implemented the principle that cross-border income should be taxed once – that is not more and but also not less than once. For example, the 2016 Model does not reduce withholding taxes on payments of highly mobile income that are made to related persons that enjoy low or no taxation with respect …

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

Faculty Articles

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 …

A Different Unified Approach To Global Tax Policy: Addressing The Challenges Of Underdevelopment, Tarcisio Magalhaes, Ivan Ozai

Articles & Book Chapters

Experts from the North have long tried to teach countries in the South how to tax. For decades, they assumed the main challenges were domestic and there was a right answer to be found somewhere in the developed world that could be replicated everywhere else. Only more recently have they dedicated more attention to the international realm, yet their solutions remain tied to technical rules designed by a few specialists, as exemplified by the OECD Secretariat’s “Unified Approach” for the taxation of the digital economy. From a critical and historical socio-legal perspective, this Article argues that such technocratic approaches are …

Taxing The Ivory Tower: Evaluating The Excise Tax On University Endowments, Jennifer Bird-Pollan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 introduced the first-ever excise tax imposed on the investment income of university endowments. While it is a relatively small tax, this new law is a first step towards the exploration of taxing non-profit entities on the vast sums of wealth they hold in their endowments. In this essay I take the new tax as a starting place for investigating the justification for tax exemption for universities and thinking through the consequences of changing our approach, both in the form of the new excise tax and possible alternatives. There remain reasons to be …

Addressing Hate: Georgia, The Irs, And The Ku Klux Klan, Samuel D. Brunson

Faculty Publications & Other Works

In 1944, the Ku Klux Klan officially suspended its operations. Two years later, it had entirely ended. In part this was the inevitable result of a decade of declining influence and membership. In part, though, it was the result of actions by the federal government and the state of Georgia. In 1916 the Ku Klux Klan incorporated as a Georgia fraternal organization, following a model of the Masons and other fraternal organizations. It also claimed to be a tax-exempt fraternal beneficiary society under the new federal income tax. These legal statuses provided the Klan with legal rights and benefits and …

Fundamental Funds: Tax Credits And The Increasing Tension Between The Free Exercise Clause And Establishment Clause—Espinoza V. Montana Department Of Revenue, 140 S. Ct. 2246 (2020), Elizabeth Jacobson

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

God Is My Roommate? Tax Exemptions For Parsonages Yesterday, Today, And (If Constitutional) Tomorrow, Samuel D. Brunson

Faculty Publications & Other Works

In 2019, the Seventh Circuit decided an Establishment Clause question that had been percolating through the courts for two decades. It held that the parsonage allowance, which permits “ministers of the gospel” to receive an untaxed housing allowance, does not violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. It grounded its conclusion in part on the “historical significance” test the Supreme Court established in its Town of Greece v. Galloway decision.

In coming to that conclusion, the Seventh Circuit cited a 200-year unbroken history of property tax exemptions for religious property. According to the Seventh Circuit, that history demonstrated that both …

The Carbon Price Equivalent: A Metric For Comparing Climate Change Mitigation Efforts Across Jurisdictions, Gabriel Weil

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Climate change presents a global commons problem: Emissions reductions on the scale needed to meet global targets do not pass a domestic cost-benefit test in most countries. To give national governments ample incentive to pursue deep decarbonization, mutual interstate coercion will be necessary. Many proposed tools of coercive climate diplomacy would require a onedimensional metric for comparing the stringency of climate change mitigation policy packages across jurisdictions. This article proposes and defends such a metric: the carbon price equivalent. There is substantial variation in the set of climate change mitigation policy instruments implemented by different countries. Nonetheless, the consequences of …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Keeping People In Their Homes: How A Reduction In Property Tax Burden Can Retain Homeownership For Low-Income Communities, Andy O'Connell, Daniel Lange

Law Student Publications

This article seeks to educate policymakers and advocates on the benefits of a reduction in real property tax burdens. In Virginia, there is a dangerous combination of high real property taxes and low income that can lead homeowners to become delinquent on their property taxes. Ultimately, this can lead to taxpayers' homes being foreclosed upon. The best solution for Virginia is the Circuit Breaker tax credit, a program enacted by many other states that allows for a maximum property tax burden for families based on their income and amount of assets. This program is pinpointed to only helping those who …

Changing The Face Of College Sports One Tax Return At A Time, Kathryn Kisska-Schulze, Adam Epstein

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.