Comments on Kleinbard's "The Right Tax at the Right Time" (discussing his Dual BEIT proposal)

Today, at the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation's 2017 Academic Symposium, I was the discussant for a paper by Ed Kleinbard that discusses his business tax reform proposal, the dual BEIT (dual for using the dual income tax to separate capital income from labor income; BEIT for business enterprise income tax).

The slides for my comments are available here. Two quick bottom lines might be (1) I think this proposal deserves to be on the agenda when people discuss business tax reform, and (2) for all of the various proposals out there, it's analytically useful to decompose them a bit into their multiple components.

Two acronyms in the slides that I didn't explain because I knew they would be covered in Ed's presentation are (1) COCA = cost of capital allowance (allowed to businesses on their assets inline of any actual interest deductions, and (2) PCO = participating controlling owner (who the proposal taxes on suspected labor income that has been retained at the entity level rather than being paid out as salary).