Our country faces a serious fiscal crisis. According to President Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, the nation is on an unsustainable fiscal path, with spending well above tax revenue. The Congressional Budget Office projects that, under current policies, federal...

A number of recent proposals have called for broadening the individual income tax base while lowering statutory income tax rates. Such proposals would eliminate or curtail various preferential income tax provisions and use some or all of the resulting revenue to lower statutory tax rates. In...

This article concludes a two-part series on effective marginal tax rates (EMTRs) and the U.S. individual income tax system. The EMTR is the change in tax liability that occurs when an additional dollar of income, here taken to be labor income, is earned. In an income tax system, the EMTR...

Brill, Satel, and Viard examine proposals to extend federal and state tobacco taxes to e-cigarettes. They conclude that e-cigarettes should not be subjected to tobacco taxes at this time, because the current medical evidence does not point to any significant adverse health effects

The passage of time and changing circumstances have rendered the physical-presence requirement articulated in National Bellas Hess, Inc. v. Department of Revenue, 386 U.S. 753, 758 (1967), and Quill Corporation v. North Dakota, 504 U.S. 298, 324-15 (1992), a harmful anachronism. Standard tools...

Because tax policy is a reflection of values, citizens in a democratic society should be concerned with how taxes are collected and spent.

Because tax policy is a reflection of values, citizens in a democratic society should be concerned with how taxes are collected and spent.