The tax reform debate in America is largely framed as a conflict of competing principles rather than shared goals and the resulting politicized power struggle has left us blind to a critical flaw in fiscal policy: Structural preferences that shelter wealth from direct taxation are subsidizing...

Recently, attention has focused on the estate tax. To date, however, the debate over estate taxes has been nearly devoid of standard considerations of deadweight loss. We develop a framework for computing the deadweight loss of a revenue-neutral switch from an estate tax to a capital income tax,...