Taxation is shadow life. As our culture monetizes more and more life activities, the shadow grows. This article looks at the potential tax issues arising from a new life activity: online role-playing games in virtual worlds. Currently, some 12 million people regularly play such games and the...

Each year, the government loses hundreds of billions of dollars in tax revenue due to underreporting by individual taxpayers. According to standard deterrence theory, policymakers should be able to reduce tax evasion by increasing tax penalties, raising the audit rate, or some combination of the...

Tax compliance in the United States historically hovers in the 80 percent range, costing the nation approximately half a trillion dollars annually in uncollected tax revenue. To foster greater tax compliance, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) should employ whatever tools are at its disposal....

Today’s record levels of economic inequality are infecting our future as the top 0.01% bequest vast wealth to their descendants. With the death of the Rule Against Perpetuities (RAP), this inequality has the potential to harden social class lines not just for a generation or two but forever....

When policymakers look to trim fat from the federal government they too often ignore half the problem: the vast and complicated set of spending programs administered by the IRS. These programs are often referred to as tax expenditures, but this paper argues that they should be viewed just like...

In “A Critical Look at the Economic Argument for Taxing Only Labor Income,” I challenge the tax substitution argument, which according to accepted wisdom fairly establishes that it is best to tax only labor earnings. A portion of Critical Look is directed at Professors Bankman and Weisbach's...

According to accepted wisdom, quot;the tax substitution argumentquot; fairly establishes that it is best to tax only labor income, and not also income from savings and investment. In this Article, I show that the tax substitution argument - which is actually a disjointed collection of arguments...

The dominant view in tax law and policy is that achieving the optimal balance of revenue, efficiency, and equity generally requires basing taxes and transfers solely on income from labor and not also on other potentially taxable attributes such as income from capital. The optimality of...

The repeal of the estate tax for one year only in 2010 creates vast uncertainty but also provides an opportunity to reconsider the taxation of million would include in income and pay a 15 percentage point surtax on gifts and bequests. This paper proposes replacing the estate tax with an...