This paper argues for enactment of accrual-based taxation of deferred compensation. Changes made by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 expanded the tax subsidy for deferred compensation, increasing an unjustifiable drain on federal revenues. Under accrual-based taxation, a corporate executive...

The United States generally imposes two levels of federal income tax on corporate profits. The first level taxes income to the corporation; the second level taxes dividends to the shareholders. Academics and policymakers have long considered this double tax to be quot;unusual, unfair, and...

This paper examines the relationship between tax penalties and tax compliance. Conventional accounts, drawing from deterrence theory and norms theory, assume that the relationship is purely instrumental - that the function of tax penalties is solely to promote tax compliance. This paper...

This article analyzes the pension-reform bill introduced in 2019 by Senator Portman and Senator Cardin. Earlier Portman-Cardin bills, enacted in 1996, 2001, and 2006, substantially increased the amounts that higher-income families can save in tax-qualified retirement plans and IRAs, but they...

This article examines the problem of legislative entrenchment through a particular focus on federal fiscal policy. The conventional academic debate about legislative entrenchment centers on hard entrenchment, but hard entrenchment is highly improbable – perhaps simply impossible – under the...

This article sets out the case for repealing the $1 million tax cap on executive pay. The cap is easily avoided and, when not avoided, widely ignored. Since enactment in 1993, the cap has had little effect in reducing executive pay or in linking pay to performance. Even worse, the cap increases...

This paper identifies and analyzes a recent trend toward “clean” federal tax legislation. Existing explanations of the tax-legislative process account for the regular, highly particularistic tax legislation prevalent during the 1980s and the early 1990s using legislator-motivation and...

Pay arrangements for managers of public corporations typically include substantial amounts of compensation deferred through non-qualified retirement plans. As a departure from the familiar baseline of current payment for current services, this presents a longstanding puzzle. The...

Over the past quarter century, Congress has enacted several major reforms for retirement plans and individual retirement accounts, usually with large bipartisan, bicameral majorities. Legislators have claimed each time that the reforms would improve retirement security for millions of Americans,...

Over the past four decades, Congress has repeatedly used tax policy to address executive-compensation practices, most notably through golden-parachute penalty taxes (enacted in 1984), a $1 million cap on compensation deductions (enacted in 1993 and expanded in 2017), and penalty taxes on...