What does the Constitution mean when it says that “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States” (US Const. Article I, Section 8, Clause 1)?The definition of...

The best way of overcoming political polarization in the US (the last two elections were both decided by fewer than 100,000 votes in WI, MI, PA (2016) and WI, AZ, GA (2020)) is to reduce disparities in education. But how can we do that?The basic problem arises from the US system of funding K-12...

While there have been few decided cases under the 1995 Transfer Pricing regulations and the OECD Guidelines, it is clear by now that the transfer pricing problem is as bad as it ever was. That is why my co-authors Kimberly Clausing and Michael Durst and I have recently re-proposed adopting...

The US Supreme Court last decided a federal tax case on constitutional grounds in 1920, a century ago. The case was Eisner v. Macomber, and the issue was whether Congress had the power under the Sixteenth Amendment (authorizing an income tax, 1913) to include stock dividends in the tax base. The...

This article will argue that we should tax corporations for the same reason we originally adopted the corporate tax in 1909: to limit the power and regulate the behavior of our largest corporations, which are monopolies or quasi-monopolies that dominate their respective fields and drive their...

Coca Cola v. Commissioner (Tax Court, Nov. 18, 2020) is the first decisive IRS victory in a major transfer pricing case since 1979. If the outcome is not reversed on appeal, this will mark an important shift in transfer pricing litigation in the US, and perhaps indicate that the IRS could win...

This chapter examines the origins of the current corporate tax in the Corporate Excise Tax Act of 1909. It argues that unlike the 1894 version of the corporate tax, which was aimed primarily at taxing wealthy shareholders, the 1909 tax had a regulatory aim: It was intended to regulate and...

The commentary notes that the arguments for repealing the corporate AMT are not particularly persuasive. Rather, the commentary believes that, at best, Chorvat and Knoll "make a case for reforming the corporate AMT, not for repealing it." The commentary states the case for retaining the...

This Book Review is divided into three Parts. Part I summarizes the main findings of Does Atlas Shrug?, emphasizing their contribution to the debate on taxing the rich. In general, those finding are inconclusive in regard to whether taxing the rich exacts an unacceptable economic price. Parts II...

In this article, Prof. Avi-Yonah argues that the legal academic debate about fundamental tax reform from 1974 onward has been skewed by the assumption that a consumption tax must replace the income tax. He addresses three of the major issue in recent writings on the income/consumption tax...