Recent proposals from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D NY) to raise the top marginal tax rates under the income tax, and from Senator Elizabeth Warren (D Mass), to add a stand-alone wealth tax to the existing mix of taxes, are promising beginnings. They have burst forth from a veritable desert of...

This brief commentary argues that Congress is unlikely to do anything dramatic with estate tax reform in 2012 – either allowing the tax to return to its Year 2000 levels, of a $1 million per person exemption and a 55% tax rate, in January 2013 or repealing the tax in full – because Congress...

In the 1970s, American society saw the emergence of a conservative, laissez-faire argument that preferential treatment of women is somehow unnecessary given increased labor participation and a shrinking gender wage gap. Conversely, this Article emphasizes that equality of the right sort...

This Article introduces the concept of a property-tax bundle of rights. There i s no property without tax; tax inevitably affects property rights. America has settled into an absolute conception of the property-tax bundle, under which private individuals have absolute power over their property...

There is too much money in American politics, and too much of it comes from too few citizens. Mega-donors like Sheldon Adelson or Tom Steyer make $100 million political expenditures every election cycle. Attempts to limit such large political contributions have failed at every level: judicially,...

Virtually all liberal egalitarian advocates of redistributive taxation support an income tax, believing that consumption taxes fail to reach capital and its yield. But this is not true under progressive rates. There are two forms of consumption tax, prepaid and postpaid. A consistent progressive...

The traditional understanding of broad-based tax systems contrasts an income tax with all forms of a consumption tax. The income tax, alone, includes the yield to capital in its base; consumption taxes do not. Simple financial analysis demonstrates the equivalence of the two most common classes...

Welfare economics suggests that the tax system is the appropriate place to effect redistribution from those with more command over material resources to those with less - that is, in short, to serve "equity." Society should set other mechanisms of private and public law, including public finance...

Traditional tax policy has been locked in a seemingly all-or-nothing debate between two apparent extremes, income and consumption taxation. But there are three choices of a comprehensive tax system, not two. This is because, under progressive rates, the two canonical types of consumption tax...

In late July 2022, as the Inflation Reduction Act was being finalized, a provision limiting the carried interest preference, which allows billionaire hedge fund managers to qualify for the long-term capital gains rate on their highly lucrative “carry,” was scrapped. This continued a string...