Perhaps the most fundamental questions in tax legal scholarship concern debates about what should be the ideal tax base or tax bases. In particular, scholars have vigorously disagreed about (1) whether the United States should follow other developed countries in supplementing its income tax with...

A particular methodology derived from public finance economics has become very influential in the legal literature on taxation and related topics. Sometimes called the “double-distortion” approach, this methodology forms the heart of Louis Kaplow's book “The Theory of Taxation and Public...

There are both administrative and political constraints on the extent to which real-world tax systems might plausibly be reformed. No one seriously suggests that tax avoidance and evasion could be completely eliminated in real-world contexts. To better cope with tax avoidance and evasion, and to...