Politicians across Canada's political spectrum strive to position themselves as defenders of the middle class, and tax policy is a prime vehicle for making this pitch. Any tax reform proposal can be examined critically to evaluate its likely distributional impacts and how well these map onto...

Middle class taxpayers bear a disproportionately high tax burden, in part, because of a systemic failure to understand factual circumstances of these individuals and the impact of particular Code provisions on them. A prime example is the applicability of IRC Section 67's limitation on...

This document gathers together 22 essays that were originally published as online commentary by Professor Neil H. Buchanan, between 2008 and 2012. All but one of the essays first appeared on the Dorf on Law blog. In these essays, Professor Buchanan discusses the arguments for and against...

This paper examines the policy option of providing government assistance to families with young children and financing it by increasing income taxes when the children leave home and the parents' wages rise due to their tenure in the labor market. We examine the expenditure composition and the...

In this paper the “evidence-based” framework of the field of Family Policy is applied to tax policy. The empirical and scientific data on the role of family in public policymaking is applied to current tax discourse on the family, including the debate over the joint tax return. The proposals...