NYU Tax Policy Colloquium on Manoj Viswanathan’s Retheorizing Tax Progressivity, Part 2

 After the windup in my prior blogpost, here is more of the pitch concerning the paper itself, organized by its 4 main parts.

1. Why progressivity matters – Arguably, this section title should change to better tip off to readers its content and main takeaway. It argues that distribution is what matters, not “progressivity” within the contours of a tax system that is merely a subset of the broader fiscal system, and shows how the tax policy literature has moved over the decades in exactly this direction.

In earlier decades, the literature tended to discuss “ability to pay” and how it related to how progressive the tax system ought to be. For example, declining marginal utility (DMU) was understood as supporting rising absolute tax burdens as (say) one’s income increased. If DMU rose fast enough, one would want average tax rates (ATRs), not just absolute tax liabilities, to rise with income, and this is how progressivity was typically defined.

As the paper notes, one problem in the “ability to pay” era was the lack of a clear basis just how fast (if at all) ATRs should rise with income. But another problem was that, as I noted in the prior blogpost, ATRs could be misleading absent a budget-neutral and indeed revenue-neutral comparison. One couldn’t ignore the spending side in making informative distributional assessments.

Next in the tax policy literature, as the paper notes, came Blum and Kalven’s famous early-1950s piece, The Uneasy Case for Progressive Taxation. After a whole lot of very sharp argumentation, Blum and Kalven famously conclude that the case for progressivity is best grounded in the aesthetic view that inequality is “unlovely.” Viswanathan rightly notes that this presupposes focusing on overall distribution – although Blum and Kalven emphatically that one simply can’t do a thing about the incidence of government spending, which instead should be treated for analytical purposes as if the revenues, rather than being used in any way, had simply been thrown into the sea.

That aspect of the Blum-Kalven analysis is now a bit dated, but mainly because the world has changed. They had in mind a bunch of tedious and unilluminating debates in the literature of the time about who benefits more from, say, police and national defense spending: the rich because they have more property to defend? The poor because the rich could hire private armies if they had to? While that point about the difficulty of allocating certain types of public goods spending remains valid, the changes in the federal budget since the early 1950s – e.g., the rise of Medicare and Medicaid – means that a lot of things on the spending side now can be meaningfully allocated.

Anyway, though, the Viswanathan paper rightly notes that Blum and Kalven are already, despite that disclaimer, moving towards a whole-budget view. Optimal tax theory (OTT), which it discusses next, then goes the rest of the way in that direction.

2. Definitional ambiguities – This very useful section of the paper includes the contribution it makes that I suspect will be best remembered: the introduction of the term “progressivity base.” Defining such a thing is an application of devising vertical distributional measures more generally.

There is no one right answer to what the progressivity base for distributional assessments (including those of tax progressivity) should be. But we can see the concept at work, albeit without the name and sometimes without a clear expression of what is going or or why, in such circumstances as the following: (a) the Joint Committee on Taxation uses “expanded income” to measure the progressivity of given tax legislation, (b) NGO or other private-sector analysts use income or wealth to assess the progressivity of, say, property or consumption taxes.

If I had to list some of the more plausible progressivity base candidates, I would include at least: (a) expanded income (and at the limit Haig-Simons income, (b) wealth, (c) wealth plus the present value of expected future earnings, and (d) lifetime income including inheritance. A key issue here, of course, is the choice of time frame, e.g., snapshot versus a longer period.

Anyway, in a standard ATR computation the progressivity base supplies the denominator, and the numerator is something like taxes paid or accrued or borne economically. (Again, there are time frame issues here.) But I think the paper could call out at least one dubious entry in the field that it mentions. The Cato Institute argued recently that the 2017 tax act was progressive because poor people had a larger percentage reduction in tax liability than rich people. Thus, if a poor person’s liability went down from $1 to zero (i.e., by 100%), while Jeff Bezos’ liability went down by only 99.9% (e.g., from $100 million to $100,000), this would be a progressive change.

With all due respect to Cato – which not only does some good work, but indeed (on a personal note) once was kind enough to publish an article penned by me – I don’t think this was their best moment. The change in my tax liability as a % of everyone’s tax liability is simply not a good enough measure of a given tax enactment’s effect on me – especially absent a full-budget, budget-neutral comparison – to be plausible as the numerator here. Its use in that instance smacks of trolling – as in, “we like the 2017 tax act for other reasons, but just to blow some smoke in the air we’re going to use the only measure we can think of that yields the result we want.” So I think it would make sense for the article to call them out on this, in the friendly hope of encouraging better work from them the next time.

3. Calculational ambiguities – The article notes that, in assessing the numerator (tax burden), it would be desirable to adjust taxes paid to reflect determinations of incidence and deadweight loss, insofar as this was sufficiently feasible.

This is a very good point, although its feasibility in particular cases will vary. But to give a simple example, showing how both the numerator and the denominator may change, suppose that $100 taxable bonds pay $10 of interest, while otherwise similar but tax-exempt $100 municipal bonds pay $8 of interest, reflecting a $2 implicit tax. I gather that the JCT, under its “expanded income” measure, would include the $8 in the denominator. In principle, however, one should at least arguably include the $2 implicit tax in the numerator, and $10 in the denominator.

What about deadweight loss? E.g., X would have earned me $10 of income and generated $2 of true surplus (i.e., doing what I needed to to earn this income would have generated disutility that I value subjectively at $8.) But because the tax on it is $3, I don’t do X, and earn zero instead of $10

True, we are unlikely this sort of question in practice, due to real world measurement difficulties, but in principle it should be addressed theoretically.

In practice, all of deadweight loss, externalities, and internalities may be very important to how we think about particular tax provisions or proposals, including distributionally. The difficulty of incorporating them into an ATR measure should not lead us to forget that they are important.

Here’s a real world practical case. Suppose a soda tax is borne mainly by poorer people but improves their welfare, because they reduce their consumption of unhealthy glop. The revenues will show up as regressive, the lost subjective surplus from reduced consumption won’t show up, and the increased welfare if people’s health improves also doesn’t show up. This is important stuff to think about, whether or not we can make any progress in deciding how to use it in an ATR measure.

A further topic that the paper identifies is macroeconomic effects. For example, suppose we accepted Kevin Hassett’s 2017 claim that cutting the US corporate tax rate would raise workers’ incomes by an average of $6,000 per household. I personally think that this claim was wildly wrong, but if it was indeed reasonably expected to happen, and within the relevant timeframe, then of course one should consider it.

There is a further procedural issue of whether we should allow such claims to affect respectable computations, if we fear that they will be misused. But perhaps the experience of the JCT in keeping the measurement of “dynamic” revenue effects within a reasonable and respectable range, by using plausible and internally consistent models, offers a favorable precedent for allowing macro estimates to be used here as ell.

A final big issue here is timeframe. For example, if a VAT was enacted in the US, the expected current year liability effect on people with a lot of wealth would be a whole lot smaller than the effect on the present value of their expected long-term liabilities. So time frame, along with the distinction between transition and permanent effects, is an issue that requires attention and clear statement (possibly along with alternative presentations).

4. Improving progressivity assessments – Among the issues this section of the paper currently discusses is earmarking, as in the case where one has a budget-neutral enactment because it raises revenues that are linked to a particular spending use. Earmarking is a tricky subject, both because there are multiple issues raised by its political economy and other merits, and because its reality in substance may be hard to gauge. For example, Social Security payroll tax revenues are ostensibly earmarked to pay for Social Security benefits, but are they really? Suppose Congress notionally “includes” a current year Social Security surplus when deciding how big a deficit for a given year to tolerate (i.e., they look at least implicitly at the unified, not the on-budget, deficit measure). And suppose future benefit payouts turn out not to depend so much on the stated measure of the Social Security Trust Fund. Then the earmarking’s degree of reality may be open to fair debate.

Another thing that this section might do is offer guidelines for real-world tax progressivity measures that are done either by the Joint Committee on Taxation and other government entities, or by NGOs such as the Tax Policy Center, Cato, and, say, the folks at Penn-Wharton should they decide to enter this area (as they are certainly qualified to do, and my apologies if I am overlooking that they have already done so). One might lay out a set of alternative best practices – e.g., you could reasonably do any or all of A, B, C, or D, but you really shouldn’t do E or F – without being overly restrictive or narrowly ideological. And one might also note how underlying theoretical constructions (e.g., noting incidence and deadweight loss issues, even if they can’t be measured properly) might lead, in some circumstances, to systematically different results.

Clearly, addressing all the issues that I find interesting here would take multiple papers, and they surely don’t all belong in this paper. But it already offers a very welcome advance, and it would be great to see follow-up papers, whether by Viswanathan or anyone else, that push the analysis further.

NYU Tax Policy Colloquium on Manoj Viswanathan’s Retheorizing Progressive Taxation, part 1

This past Tuesday at the colloquium, we discussed the above paper by Manoj Viswanathan. If I had to give a two-sentence summary / overview / elevator pitch for the paper, it would be: The notion of tax progressivity relates to things that are important, although it doesn’t frame them in the best possible way. Given, however, that people are going to be discussing progressivity in any event, they ought to be clearer about how they are defining it, what underlying assumptions this presupposes, and how all that relates to the conclusions that they draw.

This is a very useful and needed project design, and one that the paper is ably carrying out. It brought to mind a similarly motivated paper that I once wrote concerning tax expenditures. The author might consider, however, pushing further by more aggressively defining and advocating “best practices” in the progressivity measurement business. That is, while a key feature of the paper is its demonstrating that there is no single “right answer” regarding how to define and measure progressivity, it could (a) say “these are some plausible approaches to particular design choices, no one of which is indisputably the best, and (b) call out blatant misuses of the concept.

I’ll comment in 5 parts: a background section that I will include here, and then a response in turn to each of the paper’s sections 1-4, which I will put in a follow-up (i.e., Part 2) blogpost.

Background – Tax progressivity is a measure or concept that has to do with distributional issues pertaining to inequality. To evaluate such issues, one needs to apply vertical measures of people’s relative economic positions. For tax progressivity itself, this involves in particular applying what the paper very usefully calls a progressivity base.  That is, to evaluate the progressivity of, say, the federal income or a state property tax, we look at the tax burdens borne by people at different vertical levels of one’s measurement framework (i.e., the progressivity base), which need not be the same as the particular system’s choice of tax base.

Often, progressivity analyses are engaged in a  comparative statics exercise – that is, comparing State of the World A to State of the World B. These might differ due to the passage of time (e.g., the tax system has become either more or less progressive, reflecting legal and/or economic changes in the interim). Or the question might be how particular legislation would affect it or has done so.

Such comparative exercises work best with a fully specified counterfactual. This is especially a problem if we ask how progressive the tax system “is.” (Compared, at least implicitly, to what? No tax system? No government? A uniform head tax or flat tax to pay for everything?)  But even when we are looking at, say, current law vs Proposed Set of Tax Changes XYZ, we really need a budget-neutral, or perhaps even revenue-neutral, counterfactual in order to avoid being potentially very misleading.

For example, consider the large tax cuts enacted in 2001, 2003, and 2017. They were designed to offer tax cuts at pretty much every income level. But these tax cuts were generally small at the bottom and large at the top. Given that these tax cuts would need, pretty much as a matter of basic arithmetic, to be funded eventually in some way (e.g., through higher taxes or lower spending than would have applied in their absence), do we really need to get into some of the measurement games that enliven (to put it kindly) the debate? Or is it pretty clear that people at the bottom, or their kids or grandkids, were pretty definitely losing overall, while those higher up were very likely winning?

In a budget-neutral and indeed revenue-neutral comparison, typically rising average tax rates (ATRs) as one vertically ascends are what you need for the system to be “progressive” within common nomenclature. The ATR is a fraction in which the numerator is something like tax liability or tax burden, and the denominator is the underlying distributional measure (i.e., the progressivity base).

In a non-revenue-neutral comparison, however, a focus on ATRs may prove highly misleading. Consider, for example, the fact that most of the US’s peer countries have less progressive tax systems, but more progressive fiscal systems, than we do. Suppose that we became more like them, by reason of adopting a VAT and using the revenues to better fund healthcare, childcare, education, etcetera. Our tax system would now look less progressive, focusing on ATRs, but our overall fiscal system would probably now be far more progressive than it had previously been. Or at least, to put it differently, after-tax-and-spending distribution would now be less unequal than it had been before the change.

By contrast to ATRs, marginal tax rates (MTRs) are merely a technical tax design feature that would lack the distributional significance of ATRs. Thus, suppose that (in the spirit of a Mirrlees OIT model) we applied 100% MTRs at all income levels, so that all national economic production was nationalized and then paid out in uniform demogrants. This might be a very bad system, but it would NOT fail to be duly “progressive” because its MTR structure was flat!

Still, under various fairly common design features, rising MTRs may be necessary to create rising ATRs.

As a sidenote, when we speak of “progressive consumption taxes” (such as here), we typically are referring purely to the technical MTR structure. But this reflects that consumption taxes, such as those remitted by sellers, typically have a completely flat MTR structure (at least as to consumers, if not as to consumer goods). So the word “progressive” here calls attention to a distinctive design choice.

In sum, when used with proper care, progressivity assessments that are based on how ATRs change as one vertically ascends the progressivity base. But one has to do this carefully (e.g., using budget-neutral comparisons and looking at both taxes and spending), in order to address the risk of being badly misled.

New minimum tax proposal for companies’ book profits

Reportedly, the Senate Democrats are nearing an agreement on a corporate minimum tax  that would apply in lieu of some things that Senator Sinema opposes, e.g., generally raising the corporate rate.

I am not entirely a fan of minimum taxes, as discussed here. But when political constraints limit what can be enacted, the best shouldn’t be the enemy of the sufficiently good. I do think there’s a strong case for increasing U.S. corporate tax burdens relative to where the 2017 act left them – as a new article of mine that is coming out in Tax Notes next Monday (November 1) will discuss. So let’s consider the merits of doing it in the particular way that the emerging agreement envisions.

The following are the key features that were listed in a fact sheet. The items from the fact sheet are in bold, with comments of mine in regular font.

The Corporate Profits Minimum Tax would:

  •   Apply to roughly 200 companies that report over $1 billion in profits – These probably include many of the leading suspects that are currently earning what look like large rents and paying low taxes. Thus limiting the tax’s reach might be viewed as equivalent to imposing graduated corporate rates, which is not generally the best approach. And the exemption amount is surely above the level that one would adopt purely on administrative grounds. Setting it that high is presumably a political  constraint. (I am presuming that it is indeed an exemption amount, to avoid large “cliff” effects when one goes a dollar over the threshold.)

  •   Create a 15% minimum tax on the profits that these giant companies report to shareholders – I suggested here that there may be grounds for assigning some tax liability to book income, not just the income measures devised by legislators. I have since backed off this a bit, since my friends in the accounting profession are so vehemently and almost unanimously opposed to it (although I suspect that there might be a bit of NIMBYism going on there). But in any event this is the direction in which the international tax world is moving, since politically book income nas become the fallback of choice for minimum taxes, faute de mieux. With flawed political institutions setting corporate tax bases, there is certainly a kind of second-best case for doing this. The minimum tax (as opposed to low-rate supplemental tax) design feature is one that I’d probably on balance recommend against, but again that’s not to overstate the problems caused by it.

  •   Preserve the value of business credits including R&D, clean energy, and housing tax credits and allow credits for taxes paid to foreign countries – These credits vary in their meritoriousness. I hope the foreign tax credits aren’t 100% (i.e., dollar-for-dollar domestic tax reduction for foreign taxes paid, leading to a “marginal reimbursement rate” of 100%, for reasons that I wrote about, for example here. But there are already precedents (such as GILTI) for applying a less than 100% MRR, so I am hopeful that it is also the case here.

  •   Include some flexibilities for companies to carry forward losses and claim a minimum tax credit against regular tax in future years – This is certainly a desirable feature, as it offsets the arbitrariness of annual accounting.

  •   Raise hundreds of billions in revenue over 10 years – Again, while the details will be key, raising that sort of money from these taxpayers is indeed a direction in which I believe we should generally be going.

  • Bottom line, I look forward to seeing further details, but even if some political compromises were necessary, I am hopeful that this will prove to be a meritorious proposal on balance. More to come.

The Beatles Get Back project so far

 I am enough of a fanatic to have been anticipating with great interest the Peter Jackson project regarding the Beatles’ January 1969 Get Back / Let It Be sessions. The 3-part, 6-hour movie is due out late next month on Disney+ channel (for which I will need to get a month’s subscription). But earlier this month the accompanying book came out, as did the expanded box set CD reissue. I’ve now read the former, and listened to the latter on Spotify.

Some thoughts about the project so far:

1) Although 6 hours sounds like a lot, and Peter Jackson has earned some mistrust by blowing up The Hobbit into three bloated, pompous, and tone-deaf movies, I think there’s likely to be enough good material here for the thing to be of great interest, at least to fans. One of the virtues is that, as Jackson has been saying, there is a built-in dramatic structure. Part 1, the Beatles gather for the project in Twickenham Film Studios, blows up when George Harrison suddenly quits the band. But it has been hampered by their difficulty in figuring out, much less agreeing, just what sort of end product they are after. Then in Part 2, the Beatles in Apple Studios, they rebuild the project and their focus with the help of Billy Preston. Finally, in Part 3, they triumphantly take to the rooftop (and also fill out the set of finished album tracks the next day).

2) The box set CD is a bit of a disappointment because it’s overly focused on the end product, i.e., the album they ended up with (plus tracks that appeared on later Beatles or solo albums). It thus misses out on the various byways that they engagingly fooled around with during the sessions – e.g., some very enjoyable versions of oldies (both their own and others’), some of the early tracks they wrote but never seriously recorded, etc. There’s a couple of hours of really fun, if informal and a bit ragged, stuff that has been bootlegged but not will not be getting any official and sonically cleaned-up release.

3) The box set does perform a service by finally releasing the long-bootlegged Glyn Johns proposed Get Back album, which the Beatles rejected at the time. This torpedoed version of the project often has great charm, and is true in some ways to the spirit of the sessions. But it appears to have repeatedly missed out on including the best takes of various original songs.

4) The book with its pages of dialogue is often pretty interesting – some online reviewer compared it to an off-Broadway play. It helps that John, Paul, and George are often articulate and witty.

5) Even in Twickenham, when they are going around in circles a bit, you can see how strong the chemistry between Lennon and McCartney remained. But the tensions do appear to a degree. For example, when John is not around Paul says how odd it might seem in 50 years to learn that the group broke up because someone got mad about Yoko sitting on a speaker. And he discusses John’s turning away and that there’s nothing they can do about it. Meanwhile, John waits until Paul is not in the room to tell George that he should really meet with Allen Klein.

6) George is a very active and often skeptical participant in discussing the plans for the sessions. And he’s a bit of a bystander when John and Paul are goofing around. But, apart from the famous (and here somewhat expanded) “I’ll play whatever you want me to play” spat with Paul, he doesn’t voice his frustrations, so his quitting seems to come out of nowhere.

7) It’s been much-noticed that the original Let It Be movie focused on dysfunction, while the Peter Jackson version is expected to focus on how joyful the sessions often were. It seems from the book as if both versions have some validity. They’re still great friends and collaborators, and the tensions are palpable at times yet usually subterranean. 

8) The audacity of the project still in some ways amazes. Here’s a group that had just finished a 5-month slog through recording a 90-minute double album, at which they had experienced both the joy of playing live together again (as they had not really done in the Sgt Pepper era) and the first emergence of irreconcilable differences. The White Album had come out less than 6 weeks ago when they first showed up in Twickenham, and of course was #1 on all the charts, when they start working every day in the midwinter to accomplish at warp speed a new project that they haven’t figured out for themselves (nor do they have songs ready when it starts). So they put all this extraordinary pressure and strain on themselves, partly at Paul’s behest but seemingly with some buy-in from the others, because they … Well, this part isn’t 100 percent clear. As good an explanation as any is that they are mourning their lost youth, much of it spent playing together, and are trying to see if they can, yes, get it back, right here and right now.

NYU Tax Policy Colloquium on Blouin-Krull, Does Tax Planning Affect Organizational Complexity: Evidence from Check-the-Box, part 2

My prior blogpost offered background concerning check-the-box (CTB) in the international realm. It sought to explain why the adoption of CTB amounted to a partial indirect repeal of the US subpart F rules. Partial because it only undermined the rules’ deterrence of foreign-to-foreign tax planning, as opposed to its continued application to the earning of net passive income abroad. Indirect because the rules were still on the books, but now one could easily avoid them through the properly implemented use of transparent / disregarded foreign entities. 

These two aspects of CTB inspire the 2 big topics in the paper that we discussed at the colloquium yesterday. The first is how CTB affected organizational complexity (e.g., from the incentive to add transparent entities to one’s organizational schema in order to effectuate foreign-to-foreign tax planning that would escape subpart F). The second is how it affected US companies’ worldwide and US tax liabilities with respect to foreign source income (FSI), along with their US tax liability with respect t domestic source income (DSI).
The paper is based purely on data preceding the enactment of the 2017 US tax act. Given, however, that the 2017 act retained subpart F, that should not prevent it from being highly relevant to what US companies might be doing today. To be sure, the 2017 act’s tax rate change, enactment of dividend exemption, and enactment of GILTI et al might have important effects on US companies’ precise marginal incentives and choices, but the basic subpart F parameters did not themselves change.
1) CTB and Organizational Complexity

     a. Empirical Evidence
 
One would expect CTB to have encouraged US companies to create more foreign affiliates, especially in tax haven countries. It should also have encouraged them to increase their foreign-to-foreign intra-group cash flows. One might also speculate that it would have decreased foreign-to-US parent cash flows pre-2017. There would be less previously taxed income that one might as well repatriate given that it has already been hit by subpart F. And, cross-crediting maneuvers responding to subpart F liability might not now as often be necessary.
The paper finds very strong correlations between the promulgation of CTB and multiple measures of organizational complexity. For example, post-CTB as compared to pre-CTB, US companies have far more foreign affiliates in far more countries – and especially in tax havens – along with longer corporate chains, more chains with 4+ tiers, and greater sales dispersion under the Herfindahl index.
While all this is consistent with concluding that CTB had the expected effects, the authors recognize that it does not necessarily establish causation. During the same period (i.e., pre- vs. post-CTB’s adoption at the end of 1996), a lot of other things might have pushed in the same direction. For example: ongoing globalization, falling travel and communications cost, increased global production chains for economic as well as tax reasons, the rise of e-commerce, the big accounting firms’ rising role in customized global tax planning, the rise of highly valuable IP associated with various global brands that were even friendlier to profit-shifting and the use of tax havens than “old economy” factory production, etc., etc.
In addition to its tables showing pre- vs. post-CTB aggregates, the paper contains a Figure that shows the year-by-year trend line for various parameters of organizational complexity. This one arguably doesn’t look as I might have expected insofar as CTB was driving the change. It shows a fairly steady rate of increase throughout the period, with no particular inflection point for CTB’s adoption at the end of 1996 (or for the enactment of section 954(c)(6) in 2005). I might have expected CTB to yield a sharper rate of increase right when it came into effect. In addition to having been hard to anticipate, as it arose as a byproduct of a Treasury project aimed mainly at domestic entity classification, it strikes me as not being super hard to exploit promptly. The measures it encourages (e.g., creating transparent entities that link tax haven jurisdictions and “real” source” jurisdictions) are not super hard either to figure out or to implement. Then again, maybe the knowledge did need time to disseminate past the most well-informed circles, plus there may have been concern that Treasury would take it back (as it tried to do, only to be scared off by the lobbyists and their Congressional friends). And also perhaps taking full advantage requires first converting more DSI into FSI, which might not be easy to do overnight. So perhaps there is an explanation (other than that CTB wasn’t having large standalone effects) for the relatively smooth upward drift of complexity indicators without particular inflection points.
A couple of other tables in the paper – although likewise showing just correlation, not causality – might further support the inference that here the correlation was indeed causal. Companies that did more of the sorts of things that CTB encourages had greater tax liability reductions than their peers. In terms of explaining this intuitively, it is plausible both that (i) these changes indeed drove a significant piece of the tax liability reductions, and (ii) were sufficiently well-recognized by the firms as to support the inference that they were doing it deliberately for tax reasons once the adoption of CTB had cleared the decks of certain subpart F concerns.
    b. Normative Implications
All else equal, encouraging greater organizational complexity is surely a bad thing. It may increase deadweight loss (DWL) both by imposing various costs (e.g., filing fees, hiring various lawyers and accountants, arranging various in-house cash flows after determining their optimal amount, etc.) and by reducing the companies’ transparency, which might increase agency costs.
CTB increased DWL insofar as it caused these things to be done more than previously. But it is very hard to quantify, or even estimate with any confidence, how high or low the marginal DWL would have been. So how to trade this problem off against other considerations, or merely just how much to disvalue it, is far from clear.
A further normative complexity is the following. While DWL, considered in isolation, is always bad, causing undesired tax planning to require increased DWL can possibly be preferable to the alternatives This is why, for example, economic substance rules may desirably (on balance, all else equal) impede aggressive tax sheltering that one wishes one could stop directly. Thus, suppose one believes that subpart F’s discouraging effect on foreign-to-foreign tax planning was good US policy and should not have been scaled back. CTB’s doing so indirectly, rather than more directly through repeal of the undermined provisions, might limit the net harm relative to the case of outright and direct repeal.
2) CTB’s Effects on US and Foreign Tax Revenues
    a. Empirical Evidence
The paper finds significant declines, post-CTB, in US multinationals’ worldwide effective tax rates. This decline is incremental to the effects of declining statutory rates abroad.
It also finds that US multinationals’ effective worldwide tax rates on their FSI declined, not just absolutely, but also relative to that on their DSI.
And it finds a more than 50% decline in US multinationals’ effective U.S. tax rates on their FSI.
Once again, the findings pertain to correlation, not causation. But here, despite similar independent contributing factors to those I noted in 1 above, it may be intuitively more plausible that CTB may have been doing a lot of the work here. At least to my mind, it simply looms larger in the universe of plausible explanations that naturally suggest themselves.
Purely as a mechanical matter, there are just 3 main ways that the US tax rate on US companies’ FSI could have declined during the period. (I leave aside such further explanations as declining FSI from US companies’ foreign branches, on the view that this seems unlikely to have been a quantitavely significant contributor.)
These three main mechanical explanations are (1) reduced subpart F income, (2) reduced taxable repatriations (since this is pre-2017 act), and (3) increased use of cross-crediting to reduce foreign tax liability.
Of these possibilities, (3) seems unlikely to have helped much. If anything, declining foreign tax rates seem likely to have increased its scope.
(2), reduced repatriations, is a plausible contributor. The rise of permanently reinvested earnings (PRE) that US companies pinky-swore they would never be repatriating would have tended to reduce (and to reflect reduced) repatriations. Plus the 2004 foreign dividend tax holiday is shown by several papers to have apparently reduced repatriations once it expired, due not only to the release of pent-up demand but also rising expectations that it would soon happen again. But, while reduced repatriations during the period surely is a plausible ground for the reduction in US tax liability on FSI, the amount involved may simply have been too small to yield reductions as great as those that the paper finds.
This leaves reduced subpart F income as a likely major culprit, and here it is highly plausible that CTB would have been playing a major role.
    b. Normative Implications
It is telling, although not surprising, that the paper finds reduced US tax liability on US companies’ FSI once CTB comes into play. It would have been startling not to find this result.
Absent far more repatriation than was occurring, and thus far greater marginal importance for US foreign tax credit claims, there is perhaps only one plausible way that this could not have happened. That would be if, given investors’ ability to escape the US tax net by not using US companies (in particular, to invest abroad), the tax burdens that the US system would have been imposing if not for the indirect partial repeal of subpart F would have been above the Laffer Curve peak.
While this by itself is probably not plausible, at least in the short run and as applied to the period under study in the paper, tougher issues are raised in a very long-term projection. Also, a set of rules that raise revenue may nonetheless be bad for national welfare, if the associated deadweight loss is great enough (also taking due account of distributional effects). So the fact that CTB did what it apparently did – that is, reduce US tax revenues from US multinationals’ FSI – the broader normative debate of course continues.
There is also, however, a plausible source of revenue loss from the repeal of CTB that the paper’s methodology would not have caught. That is the revenue loss from increased conversion of DSI into FSI, now that the repeal of CTB makes it easier to on-shift the reported profits from peer countries to tax havens.
Here too, of course, there are Laffer Curve / broader desirability issues that have fueled decades of international tax policy debate. This will not change any time soon, but the Blouin-Krull paper does indeed offer suggestive evidence on some of the parameters.

NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, week 6: Jennifer Blouin’s Does Tax Planning Affect Organizational Complexity: Evidence from Check-the-Box: part 1

 Yesterday at the colloquium, Jennifer Blouin presented the above-titled paper (coauthored by Linda Krull). Unfortunately, I can’t post a link to it here, as there are issues relating to data use permission that I hope will be cleared up soon. But the broad contours that I can discuss may nonetheless be of interest.

This blogpost will purely focus on the legal background to the paper’s empirical analysis, which I will discuss in a separate blogpost, part 2, which will follow shortly.

At the end of 1996, the US Treasury issued the by now infamous check-the-box (CTB) regulations, allowing taxpayers simply to elect, for specified legal entities both in the US and abroad, whether such entities would be treated for US federal income tax purposes as corporations or flow-throughs. In the domestic realm, this was a completely uncontroversial simplification. The prior legal regime for classifying, say, limited liability companies (LLCs) under state law had grown to combine tedious burden creation with near-electivity as an effective matter, plus an almost complete lack for the government to try to police the boundary (given, for example, publicly traded partnerships were being taxed as C corporations anyway).

The tricky part that may have reflected a Treasury stumble occurred in the international realm. US companies, by checking the box “open” for specified foreign entities that had only a single owner created “hybridity” of an extremely convenient sort for foreign entities that could be used in overseas tax planning. Previously, one couldn’t do this without some effort to tailor things just right, often leaving residual uncertainty about whether one would succeed in getting the desired effects. But now it was easy and automatic.

A bit of further background before noting how the hybridity worked: The main play related to subpart F, aka the US controlled foreign corporation (CFC) rules. Subpart F can make certain foreign source income (FSI) that is earned abroad by US companies’ CFCs currently taxable to the US companies, via treatment as a presumed dividend back to the US parent that is then deemed to have been reinvested abroad. The subpart F income therefore ceases to be either deferred to the US parent under pre-2017 US law, or exempt subject to GILTI under 2018-and-on US law.

Conceptually speaking, subpart F has two parts. First, by taxing to the US parent the passive income (such as portfolio interest and dividends) that it has earned through its CFCs, it prevents US companies from earning such income tax-free by the simple expedient of earning it offshore (i.e., as FSI of its CFCs).

Subpart F’s second part (conceptually speaking) is deterrence of profit-shifting abroad. For example, what are called the base company sales rules provide that one will have subpart F income if one, say, routes sales to one’s operating CFCs in high-tax countries in such a way as to cause the taxable income to arise in a shell CFC that is located in a low-tax country. This might, for example, involve the use of transfer pricing games to ensure that the shell CFC, rather than the operating CFCs, ends up with a significant piece of the taxable profit despite its doing little or nothing. 

In effect, subpart F’s second conceptual part discourages certain foreign-to-foreign tax planning. In the above scenario, for example, the taxpayer might have been using, say, a Luxembourg CFC to drain off foreign profits that would otherwise have accrued to its German, French, and UK CFCs. Such foreign tax minimization may be pointless, however, if it draws US taxes under subpart F that eliminate the worldwide tax saving. Two possible outcomes are that (a) the US company does all this anyway, saving foreign taxes but increasing its US tax liability due to subpart F, and (b) the US company decides against doing it, in which case there is no subpart F income but it is paying the higher taxes in Germany, France, and the UK that it would otherwise have avoided.

Obviously, there is a big question as to why the US would seek to deter this tax planning. We don’t get the revenues, insofar as they accrue to Germany, France, or the UK rather than to us. But not all of the rationales for doing it are founded on cooperation or reciprocity or altruism. The anti-foreign-tax-planning piece of subpart F may also indirectly increase US tax revenues, by reducing the payoff to companies of replacing US source income with FSI (since the latter may be much easier to on-shift to a tax haven).

With all this in background, consider intra-group interest flows. Suppose, for example, that a Caymans affiliate of the US parent lends $$ to a German affiliate, and the latter then pays interest to the former.  This reduces the German CFC’s taxes (assuming Germany allows the interest deductions despite, e.g., its thin capitalization rules), without any Caymans offset given that it’s a tax haven. But it leads to subpart F income, which looks like Type 1 (passive income -> subpart F income) but is actually Type 2 (foreign tax planning triggers US tax liability, even though the group’s net interest income from the transaction is zero).

And here is where we circle back to CTB. Because it treats a single-owner checked-open foreign entity as transparent (i.e., as merely a branch with no separate tax existence) for US tax purposes, US multinationals can play a fun “hybridity” game to get the best possible tax results in the above transaction. In the above example, Germany allows the interest deductions, but the US does not apply subpart F to the interest flows to the Caymans entity, because there has been no transaction. The US regards the German and Caymans affiliates as the same entity, and you can’t, for tax purposes, pay interest to yourself.

In effect, CTB therefore amount to the partial indirect repeal of subpart F. What I call its “part 1” application to tax gross passive income earned abroad through CFCs remained intact. But what I call its “part 2” application to deter foreign-to-foreign tax planning was effectively repealed for all US companies that went to the trouble (and it wasn’t much) of inserting transparent entities into its structure as needed to prevent subpart F from observing the cash flows that this tax planning involved.

One last bit of background on all this: In 2005, Congress enacted Code section 954(c)(6), which has always had an expiration date but has continually been extended (at present, through 2026). Without running through all the details here, this effectively replicates CTB’s effective repeal of what I call part 2 of subpart F without requiring transparency of the entities that are being used to do it. But it still does require one to do the things (involving the use of entities in both tax haven and non-haven foreign jurisdictions) that subpart F would otherwise have discouraged.

Okay, back to the Blouin-Krull paper. It aims to illuminate certain effects of the adoption of CTB (and perhaps later section 954(c)(6)) in the international realm. These are of two kinds: effects on US firms’ organizational complexity, and on the firms’ US and worldwide tax liability with respect to their US source and foreign source income. But I will use a separate blogpost for that discussion.

Part 2 re. yesterday’s NYU Tax Policy Colloquium discussing Daniel Hemel’s Law and the New Dynamic Public Finance

 The immediately preceding blogpost offers part 1 of my reflections concerning the paper by Daniel Hemel that we discussed at the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium yesterday. Herewith part 2, discussing just three of the particular issues that the paper raises. (There are actually lots more, if you wish to take a look.)

Relevance of age differences; age-dependent tax rates – Whether you are looking at the same person at different life stages, or the average individuals at given age levels at a particular point in time, immense age-dependent differences become apparent. People at different ages generally differ in their average income and wealth levels (and degrees of dispersion), labor supply elasticity, and it is plausible to say utility functions. This has recently prompted a large economics literature on age-dependent taxation, including age-varying tax rates. This literature may be identified with NDPF, although much of it self-labels as OIT. Moreover, while it deals with how people change over time, to some extent the changes are predictable in advance, whereas NDPF often is focused on stochastic change.

As the Hemel paper notes, people might be expected to want more insurance via the tax system against “ability risk” in their 50s and 60s than in their 20s. Also, current labor supply elasticity is probably higher in the earlier period, given not just “gap years” and such but also schooling that aims to increase future earnings at the expense of current earnings. Then of course people tend to become more interested in retirement, and perhaps less able to earn current income or to have hopes of doing so in their future, as they enter their 60s and beyond.

There is nonetheless a widespread intuition or feeling that age-dependent tax rates are inappropriate. Their use therefore tends to congregate in particular side-realms. Examples include the earned income tax credit’s being limited to people between the ages of 25 to 64, and the Social Security rule (for many years) under which benefit payouts would be reduced if one had current wages.

This topic is rich for further exploration. One area that comes to mind is income averaging, which existed in the federal income tax from 1964 to 1986 but then was generally eliminated. While the use of income averaging is not inherently age-related, those rules were designed to cover up-and-down swings in how much people earned in a given year (although, to benefit, you needed to have the low-income years first). They were intended and designed (albeit imperfectly) not to cover the case where, say, you were a currently impoverished law or medical student whose income then shot up, not due to volatility but because you had newly entered your high-wage years. But it’s actually not obvious that they should be so limited.

For example, consider two individuals who enjoy the same lifetime earnings in present value. But A has expensive schooling until age 28, whereas B enters the workforce at age 22 and earns less per year but the same in PV due to the 6 extra years. Insofar as we think that lifetime income is the proper gauge, they ought to pay the same lifetime taxes in PV, but A might end up paying more due to graduated rates. Indeed, A might even be worse off in a lifetime sense if she has to backload her consumption due to the difficulty of borrowing against “great expectations.” (We also have to think about the total and marginal welfare implications of A’s six extra years slaving away in law or medical school rather than entering the paid workforce immediately.)

Now suppose we change the facts so that A simply postponed working, in order to have fun traveling the world, knowing that she could earn more once she started. Here it seems that she is actually better-off than B in a lifetime sense, given that in her voluntary non-working years she got to enjoy herself rather than slave away in school. But it’s not clear that the possible impact of graduated rates to the concentration of the same PV earnings into future years gets us quite to the right place. 

Anyway, age-dependent taxation is bound to be part of the analysis here, however it might come out.

History-dependence in unemployment insurance (UI) and Social Security disability insurance (SSDI) – The paper also discusses certain history-dependent rules that apply in UI, SSDI, and also in such areas such as tort compensation for injury. If you lose your job or become disabled, the amount that you are entitled to collect depends on lost wages, which are discerned by looking at past wages. Therefore, if you and I both become entitled to collect UI or SSDI, or to receive tort compensation for lost wages, the one who used to earn more is presumably going to get a large payout. The paper notes that this might be viewed as peculiar since it provides what one might deem regressive payouts. For example, if A is a high-low (i.e., one with low current earnings but high past earnings), whereas B is a low-low, we might think A better-off overall, as she presumably is in a lifetime earnings sense, yet we give A more $$ than B. The paper discusses NDPF-derived reasons why this might increase the tax system’s incentive compatibility (by offering a positive expected payoff, otherwise reduced by the tax system, to being high-wage in Period 1).

Focusing for convenience just on UI, I have tended to think that it makes sense as a government program despite its regressivity compared to offering all people who lose their jobs the same payoff. Suppose that people are averse to the risk of losing their jobs – and not just to being involuntarily unemployed in the current period – because it is costly to suffer a sudden and unexpected negative shock to their earnings. This might result, not just from psychological habituation to a given wage level, but also from having pre-committed to a spending path that presumed wage stability. (E.g., consider buying a home with a high mortgage or else paying a high monthly rental, and sending your kids to an expensive school.) Aversion to a downward shock would suggest buying insurance against it, but suppose that moral hazard and adverse selection prevent this insurance from being available at reasonable terms. But suppose the government can better address the adverse selection problem than private insurers would be able to. This  can create a straightforward case for the government’s offering and indeed mandating the insurance on actuarially fair terms, on efficiency grounds and even without regard to distribution.

Traditional versus Roth IRAs – In a traditional IRA, you deduct the contribution and then are taxed on the distribution. By contrast, under a Roth IRA, there is neither deduction nor inclusion.

It’s well-known that these two methods are present-value equivalent, assuming a fixed rate of return and constant tax rates. For example, say the money held in the IRA will exactly double during the multi-year savings period no matter how great or small it might be, and that the relevant tax rate at all times is 33.3%.

Under a traditional IRA, you contribute $150 as this costs you only $100 after-tax, and then withdraw $300 that the distributions tax reduces to $200.

Under a Roth IRA, you contribute $100, this costs you $100 after-tax, and you withdraw and keep $200.

Nonetheless, in real world scenarios the two can play out quite differently. Tax rates may change between the contribution year and the distribution year. Also, the scaled-up traditional IRA would earn a lower overall rate of return if, say, you had a special opportunity to earn more than the normal rate of return but it ran out once you had invested $100 in it. (To show why this is plausible in real world scenarios, suppose that the scaling-up issue, outside the IRA context but resulting from tax rules that operate to similar effect, would require Jeff Bezos to in effect create 1-1/2 Amazons, rather than just 1, in order to maintain his extraordinary rate of return on a nominally larger pre-tax investment.)

The Hemel paper notes that, under traditional IRAs, the tax rate when one contributes is often higher than that when one receives distributions, reflecting retirement’s downward influence on one’s marginal tax rate. Certain NDPF-style considerations suggest that this is effectively backwards. This therefore might suggest policymakers’ favoring Roth over traditional IRAs, all else equal.

Hemel has also offered interesting arguments elsewhere that there are distinct grounds for policymakers to prefer Roth to traditional IRAs. Here, for example, he notes that management firms such as Black Rock may prefer the traditional structure, because they get to earn a fee on the scaled-up assets under management. In effect, they are charging the government their standard fee for earning the $$ that it will claim when the funds are distributed, but we might be highly skeptical that paying this fee is worth it economically to the government in terms of ultimately enhanced returns to it.

I read this portion of the article against the background of a prior view that Roth IRAs are often worse from a policy standpoint for two reasons. The first is that, in Bezos-type cases, taxpayers earn scarce extra-normal returns through Roth IRAs that result in their avoiding any tax on the rents (whereas they would have to pay tax on the rents under a traditional IRA structure). The second is that fixed-period (such as 10-year) Congressional budget rules cause Roths unduly to look cheaper for the government than traditional IRAs, because the revenue loss (from excluding distributions) is largely pushed outside the estimating period.

Without purporting to resolve the traditional versus Roth issue based on any one issue alone, I would note that, at least in principle (and subject to policy change risk for rules that have a deferred application), one need not base the traditional IRA deduction and inclusion rules on the taxpayer’s contemporaneous marginal tax rate. Suppose, for example, that one wanted a net positive tax but was concerned that taxpayers’ marginal tax rates would decline between the two periods due to retirement. Then one could mandate, say, a 20% credit for the contribution and a 30% tax on the distribution – or, for that matter, equal percentage credits if one wanted the PV of the net tax to be zero. In short, the question of when one provides partial reimbursement (such as via deductions), and when one imposes positive tax liability (such as via the inclusion of distributions) is not indissolubly tied to the taxpayer’s income tax MTR in the relevant year. Subject again to the question of political risk, this actually might leave one with more scope than otherwise to apply NDPF-style analysis to the question of how the overall set of transactions ought to be taxed.

NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, week 4: Daniel Hemel’s Law and the New Dynamic Public Finance, Part 1

 Yesterday at the colloquium, Daniel Hemel presented the above-named article. We have now settled into our every-other-week, hybrid format, and numerous friends from outside NYC dropped by via Zoom, although most of them didn’t stay all the way through. I hope the audio is good enough that they can hear speakers from around the room during the discussion, although they can’t see them on the video feed. I probably wouldn’t stay all the way through under those conditions either, but it would certainly be great to hear from them if they have comments.

Anyway, on to the paper. My thoughts about the issues it raises can be grouped into two main headings: how tax lawyers should or do use economic theory, and particular issues discussed in the paper. While Part 1 appears directly below, I will reserve Part 2 for a separate blog entry.

1) Lawyers and Economic Theory

The paper focuses on the existence of a new(ish) economic literature out there, commonly called the New Dynamic Public Finance (NDPF), that has been flourishing for a couple of decades in the economics journals, while almost never being cited in the law reviews. (Okay, the one prominent exception to this, as it notes up front, is Daniel Shaviro, “Beyond the Pro-Consumption Tax Consensus,” 60 Stanford Law Review 745 (2007).)

The paper’s central message is that tax (and other) lawyers with academic or policy interests should read and use the NDPF literature, although it is not super user-friendly in form (e.g., highly technical models with lots of math), due to the important insights they can derive from it.

But here is an alternative framing of the same central message: In evaluating tax and other legal policy issues, it’s important to think about such things as:

1) the fact that people’s opportunities to earn $$ in the market can change unpredictability,

2) the effects that people’s expectations regarding future government policy can have on their  behavior, and

3) the information that policymakers can derive from the year-to-year details of people’s earnings flows, consumption, and saving or dissaving.

The NDPF framing is catchier and more salient. However, its effect on a legal audience’s reception of the message may be complicated by a widely-known (if little-discussed) sociological fact about the tax policy world: that is, the fact, that economists as a group have more prestige within it than lawyers as a group.

By reason of this fact, lawyers who are eager to emulate economists at all costs will be excited to hear about this literature. But from others, such as lawyers who are uneasy or insecure about the economists’ reign, it might provoke hostility or resistance. These folks might therefore miss the intellectual payoff that the article actually offers them.

With either framing, a key takeaway is that a prominent branch of the public economics literature that has deeply influenced academic tax lawyers (and perhaps policymakers) for decades – the optimal income tax (OIT) literature that was founded by James Mirrlees’ classic 1971 article – has been revised or even (in its earliest forms) refuted in certain key respects, with the consequence that certain familiar conclusions that commonly are derived from it turn to be mistaken.

As a result, here is a misapprehension that prospective readers could derive from the article’s chosen framing: Rather than saying: “Lawyers must follow abstruse economic models in order to better grasp important policy issues,” it is actually saying: “Lawyers should free themselves from too narrowly and literalistically following economic models that inevitably are stripped-down and simplified relative to the reality that they seek to represent. Instead, they should embrace more complex and multifaceted, albeit inevitably open-ended and ambiguous, ways of thinking about various important issues.”

Going back to the three points that I listed above in the alternative framing, one should not think of them as being only in the NDPF literature and nowhere else. For examples from the pre- or non-NDPF OIT literature, and/or relevant legal literature, of considering their importance, consider the following:

–In the OIT literature, there is a thread (which I associate with an article by Hal Varian) that looks at the income tax (i.e., wage tax) as offering risk insurance for under-diversified human capital, which is subject to stochastic shocks. This is the point about earnings opportunities changing unpredictably, although this branch of the OIT literature does not (to my knowledge) look at the information to be gleaned from year-to-year earnings changes, a factor that is emphasized in some NDPF literature.

–The classic time consistency problem in tax and other policy was well-known in prior literature E.g., in principle there are huge efficiency gains to be derived from encouraging people to invest, then expropriating their holdings and promising never to do it again. But this can utterly break down not, just because ex post the promise may prove less than credible, but also because ex ante people may anticipate its being done. NDPF merely adds to this a richer and more varied inquiry into how expectations regarding possible future policies might play out.

–There is a huge legal and economic tax policy literature, to which I along with many others have contributed, concerning the effects of tax deferral as creating both uncertainty and optionality, if the tax rate in the year of realization might be different from that applying today. If all of us were therefore doing NDPF without realizing it, then I am reminded of the line in Moliere about the character who is thrilled to learn that he has been speaking prose all his life.

–Again, the paper kindly cites my 2007 Stanford article that actually mentions NDPF. But, as it happens, in writing that article I had already found my way to my main conclusions before learning about NDPF, and adding it to the article’s back end, from feedback at a conference where I presented an early draft.

That article sought to show, and then engage with, the point that certain simple OIT models that were in widespread use among lawyers and economists led straightforwardly, and indeed ineluctably, to the linked conclusions that (1) the tax system should employ lifetime income averaging, and (2) a consumption tax is superior to an income tax. Under these models, your welfare and marginal utility depend purely on the present value of your lifetime earnings, which, with the aid of perfect rationality and complete capital markets, you are presumed to deploy such that you choose the lifetime consumption stream that has the greatest subjective value to you (and presumably, equalized marginal utility for the last bit of consumption in each period).

In short, that article first sought to explain why an “ideal consumption tax” is such a slam-dunk intellectual winner over an “ideal income tax” within the standard OIT model’s contours. But then it moved on to (a) why the model’s simplifying departures from reality should not be forgotten, and (b) how a fuller and more realistic view ends up defeating the presumed takeaways (or at least their certainty) regarding both lifetime income averaging and the ostensible superiority of consumption tax over income taxation.

(BTW, this heresy drew a stern, albeit amiable, written response from two friends and colleagues in the biz, also appearing in Stanford, to the effect that I was all wrong in backing off as I did the standard OIT conclusions. I believe, although I suppose I would, that, when one looks back at 2007 from the perspective of 2021, my side of the debate comes off pretty well, and indeed has been decidedly favored by the movement of the field since then.)

Anyway, back to the point after this perhaps self-indulgent detour. In that paper, I got where I was going initially without NDPF. I focused mainly on such issues as incomplete capital markets – which impede, for example, borrowing against one’s reasonable expected future earnings – and limited rationality. NDPF, when I found out about it, was icing on the cake, but I had already gotten the most of the way there without it. This arguably weighs against viewing NDPF as such as being vital to the Hemel paper’s main takeaways, although it weighs in favor of viewing the 3 big issues (as noted above) that the paper foregrounds as really important.

Whatever the framing, Hemel’s paper and NDPF are above all about the relevance of time. Mirrlees’ classic 1971 set-up for balancing efficiency against distributional considerations in the structure of an optimal income tax expressly leaves time out. It’s about policy choice in a snapshot moment where people’s utility functions, capacity to earn $$ through labor supply, and labor supply elasticity are fixed. You don’t develop your “ability” in that model – it’s just there, as a random draw from the box – nor can you save given that there’s no other period.

Subsequent work in the classic OIT tradition then added time to the framework. For example, in Atkinson-Stiglitz (as applied to present vs. future consumption) and Chamley-Judd – often both commonly cited in the income vs. consumption tax debate – time is there all right, and it plays a central analytical role. But time is effectively uniform or flat. All periods are presumptively the same; they just come one after another. Thus, long-term or even infinite-horizon present value comparisons are king.

For example, it simply may not matter when within  your lifespan given $$ were earned (except insofar as this affects present value) or when you or your heirs choose to consume it. Perfect capital markets shift $$ as needed between periods. And the infinite horizon perspective means that there is no difference between the government’s being committed to pay, say, $1 today or its present value equivalent in 5,000 years.

What NDPF and similarly minded work add is what one might call differentiated, rather than flat or continuous, time.

By ignoring per-period information, classic OIT effectively throws out valuable information. This made perfect sense as it was developing, as a strategy to simplify the issues being considered so that they would be more analytically tractable at a first cut. But to stick to that model even once its insights have been developed and duly absorbed, and to rule out the sorts of issues and information that NDPF emphasizes, is to handicap oneself for no good reason. And again, it can lead to one’s asserting dubious conclusions with undue self-confidence.

In sum, NDPF doesn’t tell lawyers: The economists used to be saying A, B, and C, but now they’re saying D, E, and F. Rather, it offers them a more complicated picture (or choice between alternative pictures) in which the issues are more interesting and indeterminate than they had seemed to be before. This may make things more challenging, but it is also liberating.

The revolving door at Treasury

Today’s NYT story by Jesse Drucker and Danny Hakim, concerning the revolving door between the big accounting firms and  the Treasury Department (as well as the IRS and Capital Hill tax staffs), offers a case study in the difference between “shocking” (which it is) and “surprising” (which it isn’t, to those who are familiar with how Washington works).

The people discussed in the article are generally not quite in my world, but close to it (e.g., potentially co-panelists at certain types of conferences), with whom I happen to value having cordial relations. But perhaps if those who did the sorts of things described in the article were a little more afraid of grand jury investigations and the like – although nothing improper will ever be provable – they would act with a bit more discretion. They are creating at least the appearance of impropriety, and embracing systemic, even if one chooses not to say personal, corruption.
The theory behind allowing this is that the government ostensibly benefits from getting talented and knowledgeable tax people to work for it for a few years, despite paying them far below a market salary. But it’s rare to get something for nothing in this world, and the article raises the question of whether it’s worth renting the technical skills and issue familiarity at the cost of outsourcing policy choices, in a classic case of regulatory capture by the directly regulated at the expense of the general public.
I have personal experience with an earlier stage of the revolving door, that struck me as less corrupt than what we see happening today. I wonder if there are any lessons to be learned from it, or if it simply reflects a prior state of the world in which current trends had not yet as fully developed.
I entered law practice in 1981. After 3 years at a DC tax specialty firm, I jumped to the Joint Committee on Taxation, despite not realizing that the process leading to the Tax Reform Act of 1986 was about to start, because I thought it would be more fun, exciting, and educational than staying in practice, which I had come to realize was probably not for me. I definitely had tax academics in mind as the next step down the road, although I don’t think that I clearly saw my way there yet.
I got to know a lot of similarly junior staffers (who nonetheless had significant responsibilities, as did I) at both JCT and Treasury who had very similar profiles to mine, apart from the fact that almost none of them were similarly interested in academics. Like me, most of them planned to, and did, stay for only 3 years or so, after which they generally returned to private practice. This was mostly at law firms – accounting firms weren’t as big a player back then in the tax lawyer market as they subsequently became.
But here’s the thing. Most of us entered the government without really having strongly developed specialties (beyond, say, a field as general as corporate, international, or pensions) or as yet our own clients. We generally were associates, too junior to be up for partner in the next couple of years. The great majority who were not aspiring academics anticipated that, on their return to the private sector, they would go back in with partnership being at worst a year or two down the road and presumed to be on offer unless things really didn’t work out. But it generally wouldn’t be at the same law firm.
My own sense of things was as follows. I was definitely performing before an audience of expert tax lawyers who were evaluating me. (There was generally no reason for them to know that I planned to go into academics, rather than back into private practice.) They’d come into meet with me if I was working on something in their area and they didn’t have the muscle to see someone more senior with greater clout. They were evaluating me to ask themselves such questions as: was I smart, was I technically competent, and also was I fair-minded, i.e., not too reflexively hostile. But they also didn’t want a pushover (at least in the evaluative sense – obviously they would have liked  to get everything  they were asking for!), because in that case they wouldn’t have respected me.
So my incentive, had I been planning to return to private practice, would have been to show them that I was the type of person they’d like on their team – not that I was already on their team.
That strikes me as a bit different than the process that Drucker and Hakim portray in their article. Why the change? I think it’s partly about the growth and professionalization (in a bad sense) of the whole process, along with the rising role of the big accounting firms. But I think it’s also about the seniority level of the people who are joining the government for 3-year stints. These more senior people know way more than we did upon coming in. (I knew very little, as my practice experience had focused significantly on a couple of very fun and interesting but fact-specific cases.) But we were ready, willing, and able to learn, and we generally lacked the sorts of standing commitments that our successors today, especially at the Treasury Department, evidently often have.
I think tougher anti-revolving-door rules are needed, perhaps forbidding going back too fast to the same employer (broadly defined, to cover both one’s prior employer and one’s clients through that employer). But I wonder if also a change in hiring practices, to focus on more junior people who are just two or three years out of law school, might help as well. Or has the world changed sufficiently to make that merely naive?

2021 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium Week 1: Brooks and Gamage on drafting a constitutional wealth tax, Part 2

 My prior post discussed the apportionment issues in the very interesting Brooks-Gamage paper that we discussed at the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium this past Tuesday. Herewith “everything else”- or rather, a few comments on just some of the many issues discussed elsewhere in the paper.

2.  SOME ISSUES DISCUSSED IN THE PAPER OTHER THAN APPORTIONMENT

What I will do here is simply summarize several of the main arguments in the paper, and then offer brief response to them.

1) The paper’s “Indirect Tax Canon” – The main route that Pollock found to invalidating the US federal income tax as a “direct tax,” in violation of the Constitution’s requirement that direct taxes be apportioned between the states, went something like this? A property tax (or at least a real property tax) is widely agreed to be an example of a direct tax. Taxing the income from property is tantamount to taxing the property itself. Hence, an income tax that includes the income from property is really just a property tax, at least in sufficient part to allow 1895’s 5 right-wing ideologues (who were 5 in number) to strike the whole thing down.

The paper agrees with the 5 right-wingers from 1895 that there is an equivalence here. Modern scholarship has similarly talked a lot about the similarity between an income tax and a wealth tax, in terms such as the following: Say I have $100 of wealth that earns $5/year. A 20% income tax on the $5 annual flow, and a 1% wealth tax on the value that reflects the present value of all expected annual flows, not only raise $1/year each (at least, under the stated facts), but are simply very similar and to a degree interchangeable.

But here’s the problem: If A is the same as B, then B is also the same as A. Is any seemingly indirect tax that could be stated as a direct tax thereby forbidden without apportionment? What about the fact that, equivalently, the direct tax version could be restated as an indirect tax? Why must everything that MIGHT be put in the form of a direct tax therefore qualify as such, rather than going the other way around (which is far more supportable based on pre-Pollock precedent)? The paper therefore sets forth the Indirect Tax Canon, which holds that, whenever Congress reasonably characterizes a tax as indirect, it should be so construed, even if one could also have stated it as a direct tax. They argue that (i) the pre- and post-Pollock precedents, (ii) the apparent original purpose of the apportionment clause and the Framers’ broader intention regarding empowerment of the federal tax authorities, and (iii) common sense and workability all support the proposed canon.

Comment: This makes sense to me. But I believe that the current Supreme Court has shown signs of following what I would dub the “Modified Direct Tax Canon.” This holds that, whenever a tax could be formally stated as either direct or indirect, they will choose whichever characterization permits them to get the policy result they want.

The PPL case from 2013 arguably foreshadows this approach. In that case, the Supreme Court determined that a UK tax was an income tax, rather than a wealth tax, and hence could qualify for foreign tax credits when paid by US multinationals. There were dueling amicus briefs by reputable academics, both pro and con creditability, and both sides noted that the UK tax could equivalently be stated and  thought of as either one. Each then gave nuanced rationales for following one characterization rather than the other.

For Justice Thomas on behalf of the Court, this was a super-easy case. Because it COULD be an income tax (this being one of the two equivalent forms), it WAS an income tax. Why? Apparently because Justice Thomas hated the UK “Labour Government” that had enacted  the tax. I have never seen any other US court case in which the political party of a foreign government that happened to have enacted a law raising US legal issues has been so emphasized, for absolutely no discernible reason behind unstated personal animus.

The funny thing about it is that Thomas didn’t hurt the Labour Government by upholding creditability. Indeed, surely it was good for them because it meant the US Treasury, rather than companies that might have ongoing business in the UK, would be bearing the tax to the extent that credits were available. But he wasn’t trying to hurt the Labour Government – he was trying to express contempt for them.

I view PPL, not as precedent here, but as evidence that right wingers on the Supreme Court will use the equivalence of direct and indirect taxes in order to make sure that they can always get the result they like.

2. Pollock was a rogue case, that did not merit respect and has not received it. In addition to being clearly wrong based on prior precedent, when it was decided, it was poorly reasoned, reflected clear political bias rather than proper judicial behavior, and was confused and incoherent. I should note, the paper doesn’t so much lay all this out in detail, as it has other fish to fry, as offer some supportive evidence and allow one to infer the rest.

Comment: I’ll just add one thing here: a quotation from it that shows what sort of exercise it was. Here goes: “The present assault upon capital is but the beginning. It will be but the stepping stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich – a war constantly growing in intensity and bitterness. If the court sanctions … [this tax], it will mark the hour when the sure decadence of our present government will commence.”

All this for a 2%tax on income above a given threshold! 

Let me rephrase the Court’s argument: “HELP! The commies are coming! The commies are coming!” This sort of rabid (and as it proved empirically false), nakedly political, exercise does not make for a precedent that one should be eager to respect.

3) Pollock has subsequently been substantially overruled, not just by subsequent cases but also bt the 16th Amendment, which authorized the income tax.

Comment: I don’t have the time or space here to address this very interesting set of arguments, but a point that other tax law scholars should notice and think about pertains to the paper’s view of the famous words in the 16th Amendment – income “from whatever source derived” – as not just allowing income to be defined broadly, but also as very specifically rebutting the line of argument that Pollock used to say that a tax on property income is really a property tax – because the income is “derived” from the property, hence making it a direct tax even if it initially seems to be indirect.

Although there is lots more, I think I will stop here. But a final note I will add is that, if my pessimism about the current Supreme Court is justified – if they are as lawless, willful, and politically / ideologically driven, at the expense of honest legal reasoning, as I believe – this has implications for how folks on the other side from the Court should go about things.

The rule of law is an instrument for opposing sides agreeing to regulate their political competition by agreeing to some basic rules of the game, to mutual advantage if both sufficiently comply. Even if it has always been true that both liberal and conservative justices tend to come out in favor of their own views a surprisingly high percentage of the time, when they are committed to reasonably honest and good faith legal reasoning – an aspect of the rule of law there is both a selfish detriment and a selfish benefit. The selfish detriment is that you accept that sometimes you won’t be able to get the result you want, because the legal reasoning exercise couldn’t reasonably get you there. The selfish benefit is that sometimes this same constraint applies to the folks on the other side. Both sides may benefit overall from the mutual constraint, which adds to predictability, limits gyrations, etcetera.

If both sides were doing this in secret, this would be a prisoner’s dilemma. But since they can to a degree observe each other (ex post rationalizations notwithstanding), they can work their way to a decent equilibrium in which methods such as tit-for-tat, or the loss of respect from more neutral third-party observers, supply the motivation to act at least moderately honestly and honorably.

But what if one side simply rejects any notion of limiting themselves by plausible and good faith legal reasoning? The other side really just cannot keep on playing the same old game if they are the only ones still honoring it. That leads straight to systematic exploitation of the good actors by the bad ones. It’s not sustainable if the bad actors are set in their ways.

Welcome to the United States in 2021.

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