Neither income, consumption, nor wealth is an "ideal" tax base, or one that plausibly identifies what one really should want to tax. Rather, they are best justified as imperfect stand-ins for some underlying (but unobservable) metric of inequality that may be relevant to distributive justice...

Nearly forty years after his untimely death, Stanley Surrey, the renowned Harvard law professor (and Treasury official), remains perhaps the most important and influential tax law scholar in American history. The recent publication of his highly illuminating memoirs offers a convenient occasion...

Marginal rates are frequently analyzed based solely on taxes, without regard to benefit phase-outs that have exactly the same incentive and distributional effects as increasing positive taxes. This myopia reflects the notion, rooted in our current fiscal language, that "taxes" and "spending" are...

One of the main advantages of consumption taxation that its advocates, including me, have claimed is simplification. However, the extent to which simplification actually would result from a major consumption-based tax reform would depend not only on the compliance and administrative issues...

This is a slightly revised version of a lunch talk that the author gave at the National Tax Association's 46th Annual Spring Symposium on May 12. It addresses, among other topics, why there is so little consensus regarding international tax policy, and what lessons we learn from the recent wave...

This paper aims to provide a swift tour of the economic issues presented by vouchers and thus to fill an apparent gap in the literature for a basic survey of the subject. Among the issues it considers are: factors determining a voucher's cash-equivalence; reasons (such as paternalism,...