To most Americans, the United States tax code has become a vast and confounding puzzle. In 1940, the instructions to the form 1040 were about four pages long. Today they have ballooned to more than a hundred pages, and the form itself contains more than ten schedules and twenty worksheets. The...

This paper is an edited transcript of the Lloyd Leva Plaine Distinguished Lecture, delivered at the University of Miami's Heckerling Estate Planning Institute on January 11, 2011. It reviews the history of the estate tax, discusses the politics of its bizarre repeal for the year 2010 only, and...

By lowering the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, the 2017 tax legislationbrought the U.S. statutory rate into closer alignment with the rates applicable in other Organisationfor Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations, thereby decreasing the incentivefor businesses to locate...

This fast-paced book by Yale professors Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro unravels the following mystery: How is it that the estate tax, which has been on the books continuously since 1916 and is paid by only the wealthiest two percent of Americans, was repealed in 2001 with broad bipartisan...