Minimum taxes (including global minimum taxes) have serious drawbacks, and generally make sense, if at all, only if otherwise superior options must be ruled out for reasons of optics or political economy. Yet, given the “compared to what?” question that haunts all real-world tax...

International tax policy experts often mistakenly conflate two distinct margins: (1) the overall tax burden on outbound investment, and (2) the marginal reimbursement rate (MRR) for foreign taxes paid, which is 100 percent under a foreign tax credit system, but equals the marginal tax rate for...

Despite the demographic causes of the long-term U.S. fiscal gap, only severe dysfunction in our political system, abetted by malfunctioning and discontinuously responsive global financial markets, could lead to a U.S. budget catastrophe. Unfortunately, the risk of disaster appears to be...

This paper, written for a European conference on tax and corporate governance, evaluates two aspects of the U.S. legal response to corporate tax shelters: the civil penalty rules and the disclosure rules. It argues that, while the disclosure rules do not impose undue burdens, their usefulness to...

In the last two decades, the dominant norm in fundamental tax reform has shifted from income taxation to consumption taxation, among academics no less than policymakers. Few have recognized, however, that the case for a consumption tax overlaps substantially with that for lifetime income...

The persistence of the book-tax gap, or excess of companies' reported financial accounting income over their taxable income, suggests that accounting manipulation and tax sheltering remain significant problems, even in the aftermath of the "Enron era." Some have therefore suggested making the...

Contemporary political debate about Social Security and Medicare often conflates the issue of the programs’ long-term fiscal sustainability with that of whether their design should be made more market-based, such as by transforming Social Security into a private accounts program and Medicare...

Nearly forty years after his untimely death, Stanley Surrey, the renowned Harvard law professor (and Treasury official), remains perhaps the most important and influential tax law scholar in American history. The recent publication of his highly illuminating memoirs offers a convenient occasion...

Recent years have witnessed rising debate, on both sides of the Atlantic, regarding how to define the category of individuals whom a given country classifies as domestic taxpayers, and who thus may be taxable on their foreign source income (FSI) even if they live abroad. While the United States...

This is the slightly expanded text of a talk that the author gave on June 1, 2016, at a conference in Amsterdam that was cosponsored by NYU Law School and the Amsterdam Centre for Tax Law. The conference concerned anti-BEPS implementation in the EU, and the talk concerned the U.S. response to...