Category Archives: Tax Law
Aug 9, 2021 Susan MorseTax Law
Almost twenty-five years ago, Professor Dorothy Brown started writing law review articles (such as here, here and here) in which she applies critical race theory to tax law. This year, she published The Whiteness of Wealth, a book that not only claimed waves of popular and media attention but also provides a definitive statement of her longstanding scholarly project. The book offers a detailed case study of structural racism in law. It merits sustained attention from teachers and researchers, tax and otherwise.
Brown’s project has a descriptive component and a normative component. The descriptive component is based in cold logic, though made more accessible with stories from original interviews and from Brown’s family history. The logical equation is this: facially neutral tax law doctrine plus empirically different experiences based on race equals disparate impact that systematically favors white taxpayers and white wealth. In 2016, the median wealth of Black households was $17,100; of Latinx households, $20,600; of white households, $171,000. (P. 18.) Brown explains that tax law–not personal choice–explains a large part of this wide and persistent divide. She further argues that as a normative matter, equity and fairness require tax policy to reject rules that disadvantage “black families’ financial and social structures.” (P. 41.) Continue reading "Tax and Race"
Jul 14, 2021 Neil H. BuchananTax Law
Justice Louis Brandeis famously described U.S. states as “laboratories” in which citizens can authorize their sub-national governments to “try novel social and economic experiments.” His logic surely also applies to nations as well, with countries around the world offering a wealth of real-world experiments from which we can all draw valuable insights.
Kim Brooks knows quite a lot about comparative legal scholarship (tax studies in particular), but she understands that most people have only passing familiarity with that vast body of literature. She also understands that most every scholarly enterprise could profit from a comparative perspective but that most scholars do not have the time or inclination to become full-on comparativists. What to do? Continue reading "Comparative (Tax) Scholarship is for Everyone, and Everyone Can Make It Better"
Jun 18, 2021 Daniel ShaviroTax Law
Too much of a good thing can sometimes be not so good. A case in point is reliance on optimal income tax scholarship, dating back to James Mirrlees’ Nobel Prize-winning work, to treat the generally assumed declining marginal utility of income as the only reason (apart from egalitarian preferences) for favoring progressive tax and other fiscal policies. As I wrote in a recent book (Literature and Inequality): “Declining marginal utility is important, but it falls far short of capturing the full significance and effects of … inequality in human society. We are not just isolated consumers, growing increasingly more sated as we fill up on pizza slices, or ever more jaded as we push further towards the frontiers of fine living. Rather, we are an intensely social species, and often a rivalrous one, prone to measuring ourselves in terms of others, and often directly against others.” On that ground, if one believes (as I do) that extreme high-end inequality has pervasive adverse effects, one may reasonably support imposing tax burdens on the rich going well beyond those that would be deemed to have a positive net effect if one were focusing solely on the marginal utility of own consumption and leisure.
So far, so good. But while evaluating issues of class, tax scholars (myself included) have often given far too little distinct attention to issues of race. Poisonously entwined though class and race are in the United States, it has become ever clearer that “racial disparities [are not just] … economic inequalities in disguise.” Thus, we should not think that “if we address class issues, we can fix racism.”
Like class issues, race issues show both the inadequacy of declining marginal utility from own consumption as a full psychological (or normative) model, and the importance of status considerations to social behavior and preferences. Racism is not just about animus, but also about the impulse to feel that one is better than other people. Understanding the impact and implications of racial, no less than class, inequality requires a broad sociological inquiry. For U.S. racism today, I know of no better recently published starting point to such an inquiry than Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Continue reading "Race and Class in Tax Policy Scholarship"
May 11, 2021 Theodore P. SetoTax Law
One of the hottest issues in fiscal policy today is how to reduce economic inequality. Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell have famously asserted (here and here) that redistribution should be limited to the tax system. Edward Kleinbard urged a more expansive consideration of tax and transfer systems, admitting the possibility of regressive taxation to fund progressive spending. Daniel Hemel has raised the possibility of considering distributive consequences in cost-benefit analysis generally, not merely in the tax and transfer context – a move that President Biden authorized on his first day in office. I have argued that we cannot understand inequality without understanding a society’s nontax extractive rules – what I call “implicit taxation.” A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed claims, by contrast, that: “Not only is income inequality in America not growing, it is lower today than it was 50 years ago.” The op-ed reports a current U.S. income Gini index, after federal taxes and transfers, of less than 0.34, lower than the corresponding figure for 1970, when the top marginal income tax rate was 71.75%. (The Gini is a measure of inequality. A Gini of 0 means perfect equality; a Gini of 1 means perfect inequality.)
To date, this debate has been based primarily on data from the 19th and 20th centuries. In Economic Inequality in Preindustrial Times: Europe and Beyond, Guido Alfani reviews a new and rapidly expanding literature on wealth and income inequality in earlier eras and explores implications of that literature for existing theories of the causes and sources of inequality. Continue reading "A Treasure-Trove of Data on Inequality"
Apr 19, 2021 Kim BrooksTax Law
Handbooks are the best. A good one tells you something about how the discipline is organized, identifies major debates, showcases thoughtful researchers, and captures the momentum of the field. Brauner’s editorial work on the Research Handbook on International Taxation achieves all those advantages.
The volume has twenty chapters, organized in five parts. Part I, Fundamentals, digs into some of the issues that situate the discipline as a whole. Is there such a thing as international tax law? How did we get here? Who is responsible? And is there an international doctrine of tax fairness that can serve as a platform for constructive engagement? Continue reading "A Hand Up in International Tax: Brauner’s Research Handbook on International Taxation"
Mar 11, 2021 Kathleen DeLaney ThomasTax Law
Ethan LaMothe & Donna Bobek,
Are Individuals More Willing to Lie to a Computer or a Human? Evidence from a Tax Compliance Setting, 167
J. Business Ethics 157 (2020), available at
ResearchGate.
Imagine your accountant asks you if you earned any income that wasn’t reported on a 1099 or W-2 this year, and you know that you have an extra $5000 of such income. Do you tell her? Probably. For starters, you might be worried that she is going to be suspicious if you lie to her. Something in your voice might give it away, or perhaps your income this year is lower than last year and she wants to know why. Further, you might have developed a rapport with your accountant, and lying to her might cause psychological discomfort.
Now imagine that you are debating whether to report the same income without an accountant’s help, using tax return preparation software. The software isn’t suspicious of your omission and doesn’t harbor any ill feelings about whether you are telling it the truth. In that case, you might be more likely to lie and not report the income. A fascinating new study by Ethan LaMothe and Donna Bobek confirms this intuition. In a survey of 211 participants, LaMothe and Bobek find that individuals may be more willing to lie to tax preparation software than they are to a human tax return preparer. Continue reading "Your Tax Software Doesn’t Know You’re Lying"
Feb 25, 2021 Dorothy BrownTax Law
Jeremy Bearer-Friend,
Should the IRS Know Your Race? The Challenge of Colorblind Tax Data (Nov. 18, 2020), available on
SSRN.
The summer of 2020 opened the eyes of many to the concept of systemic racism, and some even started looking in unlikely places – like tax law. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) acknowledged in a June 2020 hearing that “Congress writes the tax laws. If there are ways that our current tax code exacerbates racial inequity, then it’s our job to fix it.”
Senator Brown’s articulated vision will be difficult to achieve because the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) does not collect or publish statistics by race. I confirmed this fact in a telephone interview with an IRS employee when I was writing one of my first pieces about systemic racism and tax policy over two decades ago. I was most interested in the distribution question – whether or not taxpayers were treated differently by race. (The answer is yes — they are treated differently. I write about this in a forthcoming book, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans—And How We Can Fix It.) But equally important questions were asked and answered by George Washington University Associate Professor of Law Jeremy Bearer-Friend, in his article: Should the IRS Know Your Race? The Challenge of Colorblind Tax Data. Continue reading "Race and Tax: Colorblind No More"
Feb 11, 2021 Leigh OsofskyTax Law
Clint Wallace’s short essay, The Troubling Case of the Unlimited Pass-Through Deduction: Section 2304 of the CARES Act, is well worth a read for tax scholars, non-tax scholars, and non-scholars alike. The essay addresses what may be thought of by some as one of the “esoteric” provisions of the CARES Act. The upshot is that, by using the very esoteric nature of the provision as cover, Congress slipped costly, regressive, unjustifiable legislation into the CARES Act, which was sold to the public as progressive, emergency relief from the COVID-19 disaster.
The essay is important for a number of reasons. First, it educates readers about how the CARES Act resurrects an unlimited pass-through deduction for high-income taxpayers. Second, by doing so, it helps readers understand how the CARES Act was actually regressive in important ways. Third, it more broadly cautions readers about some of the unseemly aspects of legislation, in which legislators benefit favored groups in ways that the public is unlikely to understand. Finally, by writing this short essay, Wallace models how scholars have a duty to shine a light on these aspects of the legislative process. Continue reading "Troubling Legislation"
Jan 12, 2021 Charlene D. LukeTax Law
Heather M. Field’s Tax MACs: A Study of M&A Termination Rights Triggered by Material Adverse Changes in Law presents information and insights about tax-specific material adverse change provisions in publicly filed mergers and acquisitions (M&A) agreements from May 2014–May 2019. Field identified and primarily focused on 13 agreements with “Tax MAC Out” provisions, meaning that these agreements provided an exit right that could be exercised unilaterally because of adverse tax law changes. Field also located 6 agreements that contained express Tax MAC provisions but that did not provide a unilateral ability to exit; most in this group were in the form of requiring the parties to work to address the tax change through restructuring, with termination expressly not following from an inability to complete such restructuring.
The article highlights the bespoke nature of Tax MAC provisions; while Field found that some boilerplate language recurred, there were also substantial differences among the agreements, and the article suggests explanations for the variability, tied to specific instances of difference. As Field notes, the heterogeneity suggests ample “opportunities for nuanced bargaining and value-added lawyering.” Continue reading "The Upside of Investigating Taxpayers’ Approaches to the Downside Risks of Tax Law Change"
Dec 4, 2020 Adam RosenzweigTax Law
In my experience, the hallmark of a good article is that, after struggling through a few close reads, I eventually (at times somewhat begrudgingly) conclude I learned something new and valuable. The hallmark of a great article, on the other hand, is when I reach the same conclusion but after a single, almost effortless feeling, read. The difference is a precision and clarity in writing, structure, and organization that only the confidence instilled from a deep understanding of a subject affords. Yet at the same time a small part thinks to myself – “it seems so obvious, why didn’t I think of it?” But of course, to paraphrase a famous movie line, “if I really had come up with the idea, then I would have written it.” But, as I eventually admit to myself, I didn’t.
Such was my experience reading When Data Comes Home: Next Steps in International Taxation’s Information Revolution (“When Data Comes Home”) by Shu-Yi Oei and Diane Ring. Oei and Ring are frequent co-authors, writing on subjects ranging from taxation of the sharing economy like Uber and AirBnB, to the role of large scale financial information leaks like the Panama Papers, to the impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on reshaping the workplace environment. I mention this only to emphasize what emerges as the particular strength of Oei and Ring’s collaborations – they combine backgrounds and methodologies and apply them to areas of common interest to uncover patterns or trends that otherwise might remain hidden. When Data Comes Home represents another successful example. Continue reading "Big Data and Small Politics: What is the Future of International Tax Law?"
