This article examines the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in National Federation of Business v. Sibelius (NFIB). That case held that the individual mandate penalty in the Obamacare legislation will be a tax and not a penalty, and that the penalty will therefore be constitutional under the Taxing...

This essay discusses the Sixteenth Amendment which, by exempting “taxes on incomes” from the apportionment requirement otherwise applicable to direct taxes, made the modern income tax possible. Although many commentators don’t realize it, not all taxes are “taxes on incomes,” and a tax...

This essay discusses the apportionment rule in the Constitution that applies to direct taxes. Taxes that are direct (and are not taxes from incomes) must be apportioned among the states on the basis of population, regardless of how the tax base is spread across the country. That constitutional...

Informal proposals to enact a national wealth tax have been around for a while, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, while still a presidential candidate, promoted a specific form of wealth tax: a tax on the net wealth of high-net-worth individuals. Whatever the economic and ethical merits of such a...

Some tuition waivers provided by universities to employees or family members of employees are taxable benefits; that is often the case for waivers in graduate and professional programs. This article argues that the method used by many universities to value the benefit for tax purposes—treating...

This article is a response to one written by Professor Calvin Johnson, who contends that a wealth tax like those proposed by presidential candidates Warren and Sanders would be clearly constitutional. This article argues that a wealth tax would be a direct tax and that, under the Constitution,...

This article discusses the Supreme Court’s decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, which concluded that the penalty in the Obamacare legislation for failure to acquire suitable health insurance will be a tax authorized by the Taxing Clause in the Constitution. The...

This article examines statutory and regulatory developments in American anti-avoidance law. After a look at the nature of tax shelters — with that concept defined broadly for these purposes — the article examines and evaluates several methods of dealing with them: enacting statutes or...

This article, prepared for a symposium at the Salmon P. Chase College of Law, Northern Kentucky University, considers whether the Taxing Clause provides an alternative constitutional basis, as some have recently argued, for the individual mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act...

The proposals seem to have fallen by the wayside by mid-2009, but earlier in the year Congress seriously considered imposing a “tax” of up to 90 percent on bonuses received by employees (and former employees) of AIG and other entities that had benefited significantly from Troubled Asset...