Paper influenced by Alan Auerbach

The following is the text of some brief remarks that I offered at a conference in Berkeley last Friday honoring Alan Auerbach upon his retirement. Guidelines for these remarks suggested that one discuss recent work of one's own that reflected Alan's influence and intellectual presence in any of his multiple fields.

My most recent, though hardly my only, Alan-influenced, piece is called Time Is, Time Was: Evaluating the Use of the Life Cycle Model as a Fiscal Policy Tool, which recently appeared in an Elgar Research Volume on Law & Time. It responds to Alan’s important recent work with Larry Kotlikoff & Darryl Koehler, using intra-generational accounting to measure US economic inequality & fiscal progressivity.

Alan’s work with Larry and Koehler (which I’ll call AKK to save time) does this by using lifetime spending power, in lieu of such snapshot measures as income or wealth. It finds less economic inequality, and more progressivity, than you’d find using the snapshot metrics. I would guess that not all members of the Berkeley Economics faculty, even limiting it to those in this room, agree 100% with the paper’s analysis. But the analysis would simply be right, leaving nothing further to discuss, if one fully granted the premises that, over the full lifecycle, people exercise consistent rational choice, in the presence of complete markets, leaving aside liquidity constraints.

In a standard analysis of consumer choice between, say, movies and pizza, people seek to equalize the marginal utility of the last unit they consume of each commodity. AKK applies the same approach to consumption in different periods, on the view – surely correct – that these are in effect separate “commodities,” each subject to its own declining marginal utility as one consumes more of them. But my piece argues that equalizing marginal utility across periods is considerably more challenging than doing so for movies and pizza, and also is subject to various heuristics & decisional metrics that would be irrational in the absence of real world decision costs. Plus, changes in information that aren’t fully insurable may have an impact.

I conclude that the underlying model, under which it basically doesn’t matter when one earns a dollar, in determining when one spends it, is not sufficiently descriptively accurate to be treated as more than an important orienting benchmark. Like such other “it doesn’t matter” theories as the Coase Theorem, the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, and the Modigliani-Miller Theorem, its value lies more in its showing us where to look for falsifying conditions, than in its full empirical validity.

Does this mean that we should keep on using traditional snapshot metrics such as income and consumption after all? Not at all. They still have all the flaws that AKK rightly attribute to them.

I conclude that there is no simple answer to the question of how lifetime, as opposed to shorter periods (themselves requiring further definition) should be used in measuring economic inequality, fiscal progressivity, or the question of why (and how much) inequality matters. Indeed, perhaps more important than any particular conclusion is the need for continuing methodological humility and agnosticism in how we think about these issues.

 

Sometimes, it's right on front of your eyes ...

 The authors of this piece have failed to apply Occam's Razor in interpreting the central empirical finding.

https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/ai-models-rate-right-think-tanks-lower-in-terms-of-morality-objectivity-and-quality-than-those-on-the-left/?mkt_tok=NDc1LVBCUS05NzEAAAGchMtTUmRXDQROqU8GZXoqTJzY5Xm_qtjwy4zmjGFL9lj4wOIiJtl_bWEJ0T0FTcJMpF1leoF076D4S75xq5tb36Twe-51sKCUv5OkZFrSwvtsk64&fbclid=IwY2xjawMbK1xleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFHeEhKZ1dJU0hpMlNFbjcyAR5ptk54Gxvty419TblyAFOaASEoqA57K6TmNCA5kzu2v9VgFYJw6b5izN_mnw_aem_scPhkd4CmrMePpEOfljTbQ

Forthcoming publications

I have three new articles coming out shortly. The first, in Tax Notes International next Monday (but already available behind a paywall online) is “Digital Services Taxes vs. Pillar 1: Did the U.S. Catch a Break and Not Even Notice?”

The second, forthcoming in the Virginia Tax Review, is “Right Taxpayers, Wrong Taxpayers, Deduction-Selling, and Proxy Taxation.”

The third, forthcoming in a symposium issue of the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, is “Couples Neutrality, Marriage Neutrality, and Two-Earner Deductions.”

I haven't put any of them on SSRN as yet, but will do so shortly.

New articles, current and near-future

I had a sabbatical this past spring, and thus haven't been in a classroom since the end of fall 2024. One way I've used the time is in writing.

Leaving aside my memoir (available at https://www.amazon.com/Now-Then-Memoir/dp/B0FD424K9C/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2Z45SW78HPMOI&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.qDclUhMzvsVrpnD5L2tQq7HGEofxNIvs96-FGLn4dAc._XzxKpdAJk1wDl7ZgmUBu_wZVfq02XFq_YOC_f6Wcao&dib_tag=se&keywords=daniel+shaviro+now+is+now+and+then+is+then&qid=1752697305&sprefix=daniel+shavir%2Caps%2C121&sr=8-1), the first fruits of this activity are now moving towards publication. The Virginia Tax Review will soon be publishing a piece entitled Right Taxpayers, Wrong Taxpayers, Deduction-Selling, and Proxy Taxation. Plus, it is possible that Tax Notes, in the late summer or early fall, will publish a piece that is currently titled Did the United States Catch a Break and Not Even Notice? Assessing the Rise of Digital Services Taxes In Lieu of Pillar 1. Note that, in this article title, the question mark plays a crucial role - I am addressing a possibility, not making a definite assertion. 

Other topics that I've been working on, or will soon, include (1) a kind of mainly twentieth-century intellectual history of debate over the proper uses (or not) of the Haig-Simons income definition, (2) a piece on Social Security that explores the current intellectual and policy relevance of classic works on the subject by Paul Samuelson and Martin Feldstein,* and (3) possibly something about economic concerns that are adjacent to the not very economically (or philosophically) well-grounded notion of international tax nexus.

*I was critical in some respects of Feldstein's Social Security work when it came out, but I suppose that by now it has become "classic." Also, it has virtues as well as defects.

Another five-star Amazon review of my memoir

This one goes as follows: "Pure gold. Easily the most honest memoir I've ever read: bracingly real, sharply funny, and deeply human. Whether or not you're familiar with Dan's immense contributions in law and public policy, this is absolutely worth the read."

I don't know who posted this (since it's first-name only), but a fair inference from reading it would be that we (probably) do know each other.

Review of my memoir on Amazon

 Unexpectedly warm and insightful portrait of the Baby Boom Generation. (5 stars)

Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2025

Verified Purchase

Who knew that law professors were so funny? This is a warmhearted and introspective series of vignettes that provide an unexpected insight into the life of young professionals from the 1950s to the 1980s. Always entertaining and never boring, even when one might expect it to be. A great read.

Zero revenue cost from any and all tax cuts, forever and ever

I gather that the GOP score of the Senate tax bill DOES show budgetary costs as being lowered by the expiration of new provisions (such as the higher standard deduction) that it would add to the Internal Revenue Code. This blatantly contradicts its use of a "current-policy" baseline for 2017 provisions.

The Senate GOP's refusal to use a current-policy baseline for NEW provisions means that, the day after enactment, they could pass a new law making all of those expiring provisions permanent, and claim a budgetary cost of zero.

But why stop there? From now on, they should simply make ALL new tax breaks that they enact expire in a week. This would create next to zero revenue loss no matter what they were doing. Then, the next day, they could pass a new law making the same provisions permanent, at a zero revenue cost under the current-policy baseline. They could even, under this approach, repeal all U.S. federal taxes, and claim a zero budgetary cost.

Good work, guys.

Paperback version of my memoir is now available

 The paperback version of my memoir, Now Is Now and Then Is Then, is now available on Amazon for $7.99. Kindle version is $4.99 or free if you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited. 

The link is at https://www.amazon.com/Now-Then-Memoir-ebook/dp/B0FBMJSDWY/ref=sr_1_1?crid=25JK9DBVTNMJL&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.JEwXYEX2OYLM1ZE5IX8ESrHGEofxNIvs96-FGLn4dAc.2EKk8AIrE7yGiyM9j54_0hEcDnuJMVtrOgYZjKiiDJ4&dib_tag=se&keywords=daniel+shaviro+now+is+now+and+then+is+then&qid=1750017020&sprefix=daniel+shaviro%2Caps%2C162&sr=8-1

Memoir now live

My memoir, "Now Is Now and Then Is Then," has gone live on Kindle for a mere $4.99. 

Memoir now almost live

Today I self-published my memoir, Now Is Now and Then Is Then, on Kindle Direct Publishing. Kindle price $4.99, but not available for perhaps another 72 hours. I'll add a print-on-demand paperback option next week; couldn't do so today due to formatting issues.

Quandary

 Over the last few months, I've written a fairly interesting and unique literary work (if I do say so myself). It's a memoir, covering the period from my very first memory through age 29, when I both met my wife and got my first academic teaching job. Tentative title: "Portrait of an Academic as a Young Man."

The distinctive thing about is that it consists entirely of vignettes, which average about 500 words each. There are 114 in all, and the total is just under 58,000 words. I aim at a very rounded self-portrayal - as the cliche goes, warts and all. It focuses broadly on my emotional, social, romantic and intellectual development, culminating in my finding myself, and coming to understand why the path I ultimately chose was right for me. Each vignette places the reader in the room with me, and they generally end with a twist or payoff that brings out the essence of each of the rendered experiences.

The initial feedback that I've gotten from readers is extremely positive. E.g., I have been told that reading it is like having potato chips or chocolate chip cookies on the table – it’s always easy to read just one more vignette, and then the one after that.

Naturally, I would like to publish it. But my initial efforts have been frustrating. The university presses that I've contacted, where they have some idea of who I am, all said that it's not within their scope. And here are a couple of responses from agents to whom I sent it unsolicitedly:

"There is much to enjoy here .... But regardless of my personal feelings, I'm afraid this strikes me as a challenging project for which to find a publisher, your interesting insights notwithstanding. Afraid I'm going to pass here."

And: "You have an interesting idea for a book and there’s a lot to like about your approach. But, in the end, I’m afraid I [won't be able to interest a publisher.]"

I totally understand. These folks are trying to make a living by successfully placing books that will make money. And I suppose it's naive of me to think that literary merit and high readability wouldn't count for more. But still, it's disappointing re. the current state of the publishing world (not to mention, for the book's prospects).

Fingers crossed, as there are still other agents and book publishers to whom I've sent it. But I'm not enormously optimistic. My fallback plan is to self-publish it on Amazon Kindle, a free service that would offer it electronically (at a price of my choosing) andl as a print-on-demand physical book.

I'd love to hear from anyone who is interested in the manuscript or has any thoughts to offer about the project.

2024 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium

With the start of NYU's fall 2024 semester, I thought I should offer an update here on the public sessions at our 2024 Tax Policy Colloquium.

All sessions will meet on Tuesdays, from 4:15 to 6:15 pm, in Furman 310, and most or all will be followed with small group dinners that generally include the speakers.

Here is our schedule:

1) Tuesday, September 10 – Ellora Derenoncourt, Princeton University Economics Department. Wealth of Two Nations: The US Racial Wealth Gap, 1860-2020.

2) Tuesday, September 24 – Andrew Hayashi, University of Virginia Law School. The Federal Architecture of Income Inequality.

3) Tuesday, October 8 – Manasi Deshpande, University of Chicago Economics Department. The (Lack of) Anticipatory Effects of the Social Safety Net on Human Capital Investment.

4) Tuesday, October 22 – Louis Kaplow, Harvard Law School. Optimal Income Taxation and Charitable Giving.

5) Tuesday, November 12 – Alex Zhang, Emory University School of Law. Fiscal Citizenship and Taxpayer Privacy.

6) Tuesday, November 26 – Natasha Sarin, Yale Law School. Broken Budgeting.

An exciting change for this year, compared to the last couple of years, is that the sessions will be on Zoom, and Zoom attendees will be able to participate live. The key change here is that New York State has changed its rules for live class attendance such that a class isn't disqualified as live instruction just because a remote participant asks a question.

I had stopped putting the sessions on Zoom, because that rule made the whole thing just too crazy and hard to manage. Under the prior regime, all that Zoom attendees could do was post a comment that I would then have to read for them. That I found just too difficult while also running a live queue, but I can certainly handle combining my live queue with Zoom attendees raising their hands to ask questions.

Chat GPT's progress over the last year and a half

About 18 months ago (I remember the time because I was visiting at U Va Law School), I briefly got interested in how Chat GPT makes things up. E.g., I asked it what my novel Getting It is about. It confabulated in response that it's about the need for broad-based tax reform, etcetera. (Which, needless to say, it is not - the program generalized from superficial knowledge of my other work.)

Since I gather that Chat GPT improves exponentially over time, I decided just now to give it another try. Here is what I got regarding Getting It:

"Getting It" by Daniel Shaviro is a satirical novel that delves into the life of a Wall Street tax lawyer named Bill Doberman. The story explores themes of ambition, greed, and the pursuit of success in a corporate world where ethics often take a backseat to self-interest.

"Bill Doberman is the novel’s protagonist, a middle-aged lawyer working for a prestigious Manhattan law firm. Despite his outward success, Bill is deeply dissatisfied with his life. He feels stuck in a career that he once thought would bring him fulfillment, but instead, he finds it hollow and unfulfilling. The novel follows his journey as he navigates the cutthroat world of corporate law, where manipulation and deceit are commonplace, and personal and professional lives intertwine in complex and often damaging ways.

"As Bill struggles with his own moral compass, he becomes increasingly aware of the compromises he has made to "get it"—success, wealth, and status. The novel critiques the American Dream by portraying how its pursuit can lead to moral and personal decay.

"Shaviro uses sharp wit and dark humor to portray the absurdity of the corporate world, making "Getting It" not only a commentary on the legal profession but also a broader critique of contemporary society's values."

[Back to me] Okay, this comes closer than before. But a few quibbles: (a) Doberman is a DC, not a Wall Street lawyer, (b) he is not a tax lawyer, (c) he is young not middle-aged, and (d) he does not become dissatisfied with the cutthroat world he inhabits. That may come later, the ending hints, but only due to the limited nature of what he has won. And related to this last point, hopefully it's less cliched in the actual novel to have us, but not him, understand how hollow and unfulfilling his "triumphs" are.

So evidently Chat GPT is still fantasizing and filling in the gaps, but it's coming closer than it did before.

Good news and bad news from the Supreme Court's Moore decision

Today the Supreme Court released its decision in Moore v. United States, upholding the 2017 tax act's mandatory repatriation tax (MRT) on foreign source income (FSI) of American-controlled foreign corporations. The MRT was eminently sensible in principle, although far from perfectly designed in practice, in that the applicable FSI had previously been subject to deferral - i.e., it would be taxed to the US shareholders upon repatriation. Cashing out the deferred tax when you eliminate it, even if at a reduced rate, is very difficult to argue against on policy grounds.

Right-wing activists nonetheless challenged the MRT here on the grounds that (a) the income was unrealized by the taxpayer, and (b) per the long-discredited 1920 Supreme Court case of Eisner v. Macomber, realization is constitutionally mandated for a tax on income to fall within the protective scope of the 16th Amendment.

While the Supreme Court may initially have granted certiorari in response to right-wing fulmination about shutting down the constitutionality of unapportioned wealth taxes and extension of the federal income tax to unrealized gains on publicly traded assets before such taxes were even close to adoption, it soon became clear that the case was a potential nuclear weapon wiping out trillions of dollars of revenue - e.g, from original issue discount (OID) bonds or the flow-through taxation of partnerships. And this was a nuclear weapon that even the likes of Paul Ryan thought it would be insane to set off.

The taxpayers' advocates sufficiently sniffed the air around them to realize that they could only win the case (if at all) by making very limited claims that targeted the MRT in particular while distinguishing it from taxing partnerships, using subpart F to tax US corporations on their controlled foreign affiliates' (mainly passive) income, etc. While this sufficiently limited their theory's "blast radius" (as the majority opinion puts it) to keep its adoption by the court from being immediately catastrophic, it also fatally surrendered coherence and credibility. The provisions that the taxpayers agreed were constitutional simply could not be distinguished from the MRT.

Good news: the Supreme Court upheld the MRT in a quite sensibly written opinion by Justice Kavanaugh. The vote was 7-2. What the opinion does is say that the MRT is not about realization at all: the income being taxed unambiguously has been recognized at the entity level. So the case is merely about apportionment, not realization. The opinion notes longstanding precedents that permit an entity's income to be taxed either at the entity level or directly to the owners. And, given the basis for decision, it holds that issues about taxing unrealized income simply aren't reached here.

Bad news: the Supreme Court has at least 4 votes (and possibly as many as 6) in support of the proposition that Eisner v. Macomber's idiotic and long-renounced "realization / severance" requirement for treating economic income as taxable income is indeed binding constitutional law. Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch, offers his usual brand of dishonestly cooked "history" in support of the taxpayer in Moore on realization grounds. Meanwhile, Justice Barrett, joined by Justice Alito, concurs only in the judgment, and only on the ground that the taxpayers' concessions in distinguishing the MRT made their position unsustainable.

Will the Court soon hold that it is unconstitutional to tax income from OID bonds, on the ground that it hasn't been realized? Or if not income from OID bonds, then at least the unrealized gains of very wealthy individuals, as per a bill recently introduced by Senate Finance Chair Wyden? There may well be 4 votes for striking down one or both of such provisions.

Kavanaugh's opinion expressly declines to reach that question, rightly noting that it's unnecessary to decide Moore. One can reasonably presume that both he and Chief Justice Roberts are potential 5th and 6th votes for holding that realization is constitutionally required. Meanwhile, only Justice Jackson, in a concurring opinion that no other justice joined, stated forthrightly that there is no realization requirement in the 16th Amendment.

So let us express relief about the present, along with continued concern about the future.

Henry Simons and pre-World War libertarianism.

 I just posted this piece on a libertarian-affiliated U of Chicago website. Based on a 2013 article that I wrote concerning Henry Simons. It discusses the question of why a Friedrich Hayek-affiliated "classical liberal" would have supported both vigorous anti-monopoly enforcement and a high-rate progressive income tax - positions that are anathema to the likes of (say) a Richard Epstein or Milton Friedman (if he were still alive) today.

Is this my big chance?

 Presented without comment, part of a spam email that I got today, pertaining to a (co-authored) casebook for introductory federal income tax classes:

Dear Daniel,

I trust this email finds you in good health and high spirits.

We are delighted to reach out to you regarding your book, "Federal Income Taxation" which was submitted to us through your literary agent. After a meticulous evaluation, we are thrilled to inform you that your book has been selected as one of the exclusive Content Titles for adaptation into a film. We have entered into a collaboration with Netflix, and we are honored to extend to you a contract, offering to acquire the film rights as one of our distinguished Pioneering Projects.

Our accomplished team has already allocated the estimated budget for the film's production, and we have assembled a skilled production team to bring your vision to life. Prior to commencing the project, Focus Features will have an exclusive contract with you as the author. It is crucial to maintain strict confidentiality regarding all project-related information, and we shall include a comprehensive non-disclosure clause within the contract. The film's release date will be announced by the production company in due course.

As the authorized representative of the rights holder, and with Focus Features as the acquiring entity, you will be responsible for processing all necessary licenses, permits, registrations, and document signings exclusively with us to facilitate the transfer. We will furnish you with a separate contract between yourself and Focus Features , and we will promptly forward the film agreement documentation for your review and confirmation.

To proceed with the project, we kindly request the following materials:

Treatment: A concise synopsis of the film that effectively conveys the essential scenes, themes, and desired tone.

Screenplay: A written work capturing the film's essence, describing the characters' movements, actions, and engaging dialogue.

Film Pitch Deck: The essential components of a film pitch deck include a detailed storyboard for the film, a summary of the plot, character bios, and key scenes.

[ETC.]

Two pop songwriters

It occurred to me recently that my two favorite pop songwriters of the last 25 years - Fiona Apple and Stephin Merritt (The Magnetic Fields) - on the surface seemingly couldn't be more different. So why should they both be personal favorites of mine? True, both are astonishingly gifted, but there are other talented songwriters out there as well.

Part of it is just happenstance and stylistic affinity. And I have nowhere close to as broad a sense of what's going on in the music biz, even limiting it to the relatively rock-affiliated space, as that which I had, well, let's just say some decades ago. Nor am I (admittedly) as open to new things as I was once upon a time, and these are both among the sorts of artists who get (well-deserved) rave reviews on the apparently-soon-to-be-defunct pitchfork.com.

But then it occurred to me that there is actually an odd commonality to them, which consists in part of their responding in almost opposite ways to the same underlying problem.

Both were born in the rock era (Merritt 1965, Apple 1977), and were very influenced by it. But both are also much more broadly and eclectically grounded in popular music, including that from the pre-rock era (e.g., show tunes). But the problem to which I see them alike responding is that of writing great popular music after so many decades in which this territory has been so thoroughly covered. After the Beatles, Dylan, Carole King, Motown, Brian Wilson, Patsy Cline, Lou Reed, Ray Davies, and so much more for so long, I would think that it's hard to avoid feeling a bit self-conscious, as well as derivative of one thing or another, when one is trying to write songs in this space.

Fiona Apple's response is to be so raw, unfiltered, and utterly un-self-protective as to blow past the models she surely has. Try writing a memoir in the spirit that she writes her songs (at least, pre-Fetch the Bolt Cutters). It would be verging on impossible to make oneself do it, even if one had felt things as deeply as she evidently has. Now, there's no lack of very conscious and careful artistic shaping of what she does - for example, beautiful melodies, nice piano riffs, odd and shifting time signatures, what the Beatles liked to call "middle eights," carefully arranged intros and outros, loud-soft-loud and rough-sweet alterations, extended metaphors, and big vocabulary words. But she lays herself out there in a way that very songwriters or performers can.

I admittedly haven't really gotten in to Bolt Cutters (rated 10.0 by Pitchfork), although I ought to give it another shot. My thought upon hearing it was that she's happier and more contented now, which is great for her but not as good for the work. (That change is also commonly a part of growing older, and hence related to why so many great songwriters of the last six decades have failed to sustain their levels past their early thirties.)

She also may have grown tired of writing from so far out on the edge. She has commented in interviews about how tough it is to perform songs that she wrote when she was upset about something, because it forces her to relive her worst moments while on stage. That concern might inspire the self-censoring self-protectiveness that her three previous albums avoided.

Stephin Merritt's response is to be completely self-protective. Nearly everything is layered deep in irony. 69 Love Songs, for example, is not "about" love - it's about love songs, indeed as promised by the title's double entendre. And not just love songs, but, through them, all the artificial or cliched or simplistic or overly self-conscious ways of thinking about love, instead of just experiencing it, to which we all fall victim given the huge cultural weight of all the "content" that we have absorbed about it.

True, he tried to fight against this in 50 Song Memoir, although part of what's going on there is that he likes to set difficult songwriting tasks for himself (e.g., one of his albums is limited to songs that begin with the latter i, and that appear in alphabetical order). But, although I thought parts of 50 Song Memoir were great, it's more uneven than 69 Love Songs, perhaps reflecting that this was a harder space for him to work in.

2024 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium

In a prior post, I had mentioned that the 2024 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium might need to shift to a new time, due to changes in the law school's scheduling blocks to accommodate multiple objectives. It now turns out that there will be less change than I had been thinking might be necessary.

We will still be meeting on Tuesdays (in fall 2024), and the start time has been moved slightly earlier, to 4:15 pm (ending at 6:15 pm, and followed by a small group dinner. There is a small chance that it will end up being moved earlier still, to a 4 pm start time.

We'll also be meeting in a new (for us) room, a bit out of the way in Furman Hall (across the street from the main law school building where we have always met in recent years), but in a true seminar room rather than a cavernous lecture theater.

NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, Edward Fox on banks vs. credit unions and corporate tax incidence

Yesterday, in the last session of the 2023 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, Edward Fox co-presented his paper (co-authored by Benjamin Pyle), Who Benefits From Corporate Tax Cuts? Evidence from Banks and Credit Unions Around the TCJA. (I'm not linking it here because it's a preliminary draft that the authors plan to post when it's a bit further along.)

But just as initial background first, I've now completed 28 (!) years of running the colloquium, which for the first 25 years I always did with a co-convenor. Next year I'll be doing it solo again, and also with just 6 rather than 13 public sessions, but there is going to be a time change. Owing to NYU Law School's changing around the course scheduling blocks for reasons that are not germane here, it's highly likely that we will be meeting on Mondays, rather than Tuesdays. The time of the sessions will also change, either to 4:45-6:45 pm or to 2:35-4:35 pm, depending in large part on feedback that I am seeking from people who are on my email distribution list, or indeed from any prospective attendees. (If that includes you, please feel free to email me about your scheduling preferences.) BTW, if I had my choice, I'd still use the old time slot (going back a few years) of 4-6 pm, but that unfortunately is not available, as law schools need as a practical matter to coordinate their class meeting times across the curriculum.

Okay, enough of those not so fascinating prelims, on to the paper. It is motivated by the quest for a natural experiment that would offer insight regarding what one could broadly call the "incidence of the corporate tax" - or, more narrowly and carefully, as the paper recognizes, on the short-term incidence of the particular corporate tax cuts that Congress enacted in 2017. The natural experiment that it finds is in the small to medium-sized banking sector, in which taxable C corporations (among other taxable players) appear to compete with credit unions. The point of the comparison being: the taxable banks that meet this description are subject to the corporate tax, the rate of which was lowered in 2017 from 35% to 21% (among other changes adopted in 2017). Whereas, credit unions are federally tax-exempt, whether you look before or after 2017. So there is presumably some sort of competitive equilibrium in the sector, which then gets disrupted by the tax change for wholly exogenous reasons. One can then pursue a difference-in-difference analysis to see what happened, after duly checking on what else might have been happening at the same time (including, but not limited to, elsewhere in the TCJA), and with the look forward running only through 2019, given the pandemic's disruption of everything. With all that said, I'll offer responsive comments in 3 buckets.

1) Credit unions versus banks: The paper, while noting relevant literature, doesn't attempt to deeply theorize the competitive equilibrium between banks and credit unions, for a logical reason. However it works, why would the 2017 tax act change it? But this equilibrium is peculiar enough that I think it's worth a brief look.

Credit unions and similarly-sized banks have similar business models, except that the latter make relatively more business as opposed to consumer loans. That said, each tries to make money by holding deposits that pay comparatively low interest, and making investments (chiefly loans) that earn comparatively high interest. The spread, of course, reflects the payment and other services that they provide. Depositors typically get fixed returns on their deposits, and these are generally insured by the FDIC for banks, and the NCUA for credit unions. But the business inevitably has a variable return, depending on how well it does (including via pertinent legal changes, such as the 2017 corporate tax rate change for banks). For banks these variable returns go to shareholders. For credit unions, they at least in principle (but often not so proximately in practice) go to depositors, such as through patronage dividends or eventual liquidation claims.

One big difference, therefore, is that only the banks have shareholders. The second is that credit unions are tax-exempt, rather than facing (in the case of C corp banks) the federal income tax rules for C corporations. Let's briefly further consider each of these two differences:

     a) Why have shareholders? Normally, shareholders in a business supply a cushion that protects debt-holders against downside risk, thus benefiting the latter (who might be averse to such risk if they are seeking fixed returns). But in the case of banks and credit unions, FDIC/NCUA deposit insurance may substantially mitigate this downside risk. So, what are the shareholders "for"? Or, to put it more clearly, how do debt-holders, such as depositors, benefit from ceding both upside and downside variability to someone else, when the downside is already covered by another institutional arrangement. Or, if two otherwise identical financial institutions were offering prospective depositors otherwise identical terms, how would the institution with shareholders compensate the depositors for having taken away the variable upside risk? (Note that, with complete markets, the depositors could simply sell this upside variable return for a fixed amount reflecting its expected value, to counterparties whose preference for such variability exceeded their own - but this may be unfeasible in the credit union setting.)

Possibly, shareholders "pay" for themselves by improving corporate governance, which can be an especial problem for credit unions if the depositors are less able than shareholders to monitor management. And even with NCUA protection, credit union default might be a tough blow for depositors if that process is costly, protracted, unpredictable, etcetera. But still, it is not as obvious as it would be in the absence of deposit insurance why an equity tier is commercially useful and valuable.

For that matter, might governance concerns go both pro- and anti-credit union? For example, absent the shareholder class, might credit unions be actually and/or perceptually less likely - despite defects in managerial oversight - to play little tricks such as using hidden fees to extract $$ from depositors? 

     b) Tax exemption: Suppose that a bunch of depositors could band together (or pay an entrepreneur to assemble them) in such a way that the banking business they could fund by pooling their deposits could be either taxable or tax-exempt. Obviously, they would prefer the latter, so that the business's pretax returns, which presumably are expected to be positive (and even if negative, there are issues of nonrefundability) would not be reduced by payments to the federal income tax authorities. Thus, if being classified as a tax-exempt "credit union" was purely an election - requiring neither a lack of shareholders nor that one qualify under relevant legal criteria, such as those which generally require a "common bond" between members - then presumably all banks would happily elect to be called credit unions. So the existence of taxable banks reflects limits on (or costs to) the practical availability of the undoubted benefit of being tax-exempt rather than taxable. Credit unions have in theory a competitive advantage in attracting depositors, but practical factors, including both the (comparative) governance issue and the other legal requirements, apparently prevent them from conquering the field.

The bottom line here is that this is a complex, interesting, and distinctive business sector. How banks and credit unions ought to and do compete with each other is not pellucid, and will depend in practice on matters of institutional detail, although it is true that the 2017 tax act did not obviously change or disrupt any of this, other than via the C corporation rate changes (along with its other changes, which the paper argues tend not to have enormous, or at least direct, implications here).

2. The paper's main results: There are two principal ones. First, credit unions were paying depositors higher interest rates both before and after the 2017 act. But after the act, the gap narrowed, with banks increasing relative interest rates paid to depositors by 0.8 basis points.

Second, 74% of the banks' gain from the tax cut went to capital holders - 52% to shareholders, and 22% to depositors. The paper recognizes that it is ambiguous how we should classify the depositors, given that they are both capital holders and customers. But other players, such as borrowers (another class of customer) and employees, apparently don't gain anything. There is also some evidence of the tax cuts' leading to increased physical capital investment, such as in real estate, although with too low a confidence interval to support reporting this as a "result."

3. Interpreting the results (including as evidence regarding the broader incidence of the U.S. corporate tax): I find both of these results intriguing, but their import is not entirely clear. Starting with the first, as noted above it is challenging to try to understand the competitive equilibrium between banks and credit unions. How does one compete when offering lower interest, especially given the deposit insurance in both cases? Do the banks offer more in other ways, such as ATM availability and other payment services? If so, then why? Does this relate to governance? But, in any event, why would the banks increase the relative interest paid just because the equity tier has gained from a tax cut? True, the depositors are literally capital-holders, in that the $$ they deposit are then lent out to yield profits from the positive interest rate spread. But if they just have a fixed $$ stake that they can easily move from one bank to another at any time, without this depending on the business's distinctive features or variable returns, then why wouldn't the "customer" relationship predominate economically?

As for corporate tax incidence more generally - or even just the incidence of gain from a very particular corporate tax rate cut that was embedded in a complex system and combined with other (on balance, unfunded!) tax law changes - we clearly have a relevant datum here, pertaining to the banks within the survey. But I wonder about generalizability, even just as to the 2017 act.

One point is that (as I discussed here in re. Kim Clausing's paper earlier this semester), the presence or absence of rents seems likely to play an important role in corporate tax residence. Small to medium-sized banks seem unlikely to have significant rents - although, I suppose who knows if they hold market power in geographically segmented local markets?

A second point is that this is pretty much a snapshot story, looking only through 2019 given the pandemic's motivating curtailment of the study period. There may often be a significant gap between transition and long-term incidence, and we may have reason to care about both. As an example, suppose one believed that workers bore the incidence of the corporate tax, via its affecting investment levels that in turn affect productivity that in turn affect wages. This effect might take years to emerge. In such a case, the surprise enactment of a corporate rate cut (which itself is not exactly what happened in 2017) would be expected to give shareholders a transition gain, dissipating only over time as capital deepening lowered marginal pretax rates of return and increased wages.

As transition versus long-term incidence goes, maybe banks versus credit unions would settle out relatively fast? E.g., if it is mainly a matter of deposits moving around (at least, assuming attentive depositors!). Certainly, it might perhaps operate a bit faster than a mechanism in which big new factories are being built or a lot of fancy machines acquired and placed in service. But again, one needs a lot of knowledge about institutional detail in order to game all this out. So, while this is a valuable and informative case study in any event, the question of its broader relevance requires greater reflection and knowledge than I was able to bring to its being one of this semester's colloquium papers.

As a final word, thanks to my students, who were great and very much involved and committed at all times, and to the authors plus the public sessions' attendees. The NYU Tax Policy Colloquium is an institution that I care about, but insofar as it succeeds my efforts can only be a very small piece of the reason why.

NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, Ajay Mehrotra on the lack of a U.S. VAT

 Yesterday, at our penultimate public session for 2023, we discussed a pair of items (one already published, and one an early partial draft) by Ajay Mehrotra discussing U.S. tax history, and in particular our distinctive fiscal character.

As the papers note, the U.S. tax system, considered in isolation, is unusually progressive by peer country standards, but also unusually small. So Americans are not "over-taxed" (as some liars like to assert) by peer standards. But the broader U.S. fiscal system is unusually lacking in progressivity.

Nearly everyone but us has a national-level VAT or something quite similar, and peer countries almost invariably have more generous social spending. The US is unusually unequal, both before and after considering taxes and transfers.

How might one explain the correlation between our lack of a VAT and of generous social spending? Without more, the causal relationship between the two could be explained in any of the following ways:

a) No VAT -> less generous social spending, as the latter therefore lacks adequate funding.

b) Less generous social spending -> no VAT, as the latter therefore isn't fiscally needed.

c) Exogenous factors -> no VAT and less generous social spending.

It's plausible that each of these has some degree of truth. Be that as it may, the broader project's aim is ask why there is no US VAT, using case studies to look at different periods, and reflecting a normative as well as descriptive interest in both sides of the ledger. By using case studies, it explores questions of fortuity and path dependence, on the view that there may have been particular periods when the U.S. tax policy Overton window was potentially open to VAT (or VAT precursor) adoption, although it never ended up happening.

I see 3 topics of particular interest in responding to the papers, set forth as follows below.

1) American exceptionalism: Consider the following two alternative views of American history:

a) America is unique, due to factors X, Y, and Z. Therefore, of course we have no VAT and relatively low social spending.

b) It's all a matter of historical contingency. On several historical occasions, a VAT could have happened, but it just didn't for one very particular reason or another. For example - relying on the case studies' details - suppose TS Adams had happened to find a powerful sponsor in 1921 in his efforts to enact a proto-VAT. Or suppose that, in 1942, FDR had happened to want a national consumption tax (as Treasury Secretary Morgenthau was suggesting) rather than just a huge expansion of the income tax to help fund World War II. Or suppose that in Richard Nixon's first term, when his Administration was studying and floating proposals to enact a VAT to replace state and local property taxes in funding public education, he had managed to make a deal to this effect with Congressional Democrats. Then our country would be at a very different place fiscally today.

Evaluating these very different views is made difficult by the fact that history only happens once. But one can plausibly have a theory that mixes American exceptionalism with contingency such that, if we could run history forward 100 times (with the butterfly effect allowing it to proceed independently each time), one might predict that the US would end up with a VAT more rarely than other countries, but not necessarily zero times.

In effect, one might think of US enactment of a VAT as requiring the poker equivalent of drawing an inside straight, rather than merely having two of a kind. So perhaps we'd get a VAT 10 or 20 times out of 100, rather than 0 or (obviously) 100. Meaning that, if one accepts this view, American exceptionalism and contingency are both at work here.

That said, I have in mind the X, Y, and Z factors that help to explain why a US VAT was ex ante so unlikely (even if not impossible). I'd characterize them as follows.

X is the power of white supremacy in American history. Fueled by our history of slavery (followed by apartheid) and Native American genocide, and kept bubbling as well by our history of immigration by people who were socially coded as non-white, we have had a lack of social solidarity that undermines political support for social spending. White voters don't want to fund (as they see it) large benefits that they view as going to "them" rather than to "us."

Y is America's anti-state, anti-tax, and individualist tradition, reflecting Revolutionary War era resistance to British rule along with the frontier experience. 

Z is our having a political system with multiple choke points, biased towards inertia. Whereas in a parliamentary system the ruling majority can pretty much do what it likes, here one has the president, House, and Senate (not to mention the courts), each potentially run by a different party, and with lots of outside players and divergent views that can impede policy innovation even when all are at least nominally controlled by the same party.

A particularly keen example of Z in the case studies is the Nixon Administration's apparent interest, during the Trickster's first term, in enacting a VAT that would replace state and local property taxes in funding public education. This had a lot of underlying causes, including political and constitutional challenges to divergent levels of local funding, and the era's highly controversial disputes over busing. But its enactment would have required some sort of a deal between the Administration and the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate. Plus, it was apparently effectively vetoed early on by state and local governments' opposition, reflecting that by this time (as opposed to 25 years earlier) they had significant state and local sales taxes that they viewed as being threatened by a national VAT.

2. "BIASED" FISCAL DESIGN: The published paper argues that the US fiscal system is designed as if it had been intended to make taxes as visible and salient as possible, and benefits as invisible as possible. Hence, voters are predisposed to hate taxes and to believe that they don't purchase one anything.

Key words here are "as if ... intended." The claim is not one of intentionality but of end result. It's based on the facts that:

(a) on the tax side, the federal income tax is highly visible and salient, with April 15 filing, unaided by the likes of Ready Return. VATs, by contrast, are collected piecemeal and arguably less salient.

(b) on the social policy side, benefits are frequently delivered via tax expenditures and through private-public partnerships that make the government's role in benefit provision (e.g., for healthcare and housing subsidies) relatively invisible. 

I agree that our tax and "spending" institutions generally have this character. But an exception worth noting is the employer contribution to payroll taxes, which could hardly be less visible to workers than it is.

Also, tax expenditures' role on visibility and salience is a bit complicated. Yes, they hide the "spending" a bit. But they also hide the "tax" that funds the "spending" a bit. Thus, suppose we are comparing the the home mortgage interest deduction to a system in which the government first collected the forgone revenue through the tax system, then paid out explicit cash subsidies to existing law's beneficiaries from the deduction. This would cause, not just "spending," but also "taxes" to be optically higher than in the (by hypothesis) substantively identical system that we actually have.

The paper notes the following comparison between US and peer countries' taxes as a percentage of GDP. US taxes are typically at about 25.5% of national GDP, as compared to 33% in the UK, 38% in Germany, and 45% in France.

But our tax expenditures are 5.8% of GDP. Adding them to the 25.5%, we'd now be at 31.3%, bringing us significantly closer to the other 3, although we'd still rank below them. True, their percentages would rise as well if their tax expenditures (admittedly a fraught category to define) were added to collected taxes. But, if they use tax expenditures less than we do, which I believe to be the case, we'd still be closer after making the adjustment than before.

3. VATs and overall progressivity: Suppose one wants to make the US fiscal system more progressive. While enacting a VAT would do so, if the revenues therefrom were used to fund enhanced social spending (e.g., for education and healthcare) that sufficiently helped lower-income individuals, one could make the overall system more progressive still by using progressive taxes to fund the same thing.

Just to illustrate this, I've seen estimates suggesting that a 10%, fairly broad-based VAT would raise about $3 trillion over 10 years. By way of comparison:

--The Warren and Sanders wealth taxes - if allowed by the Supreme Court, which would require a change in the Court's membership - would raise $4 trillion over 10 years according to the proponents, and $2 trillion over 10 years according to the Tax Foundation.

--According to a 2019 article by Lily Batchelder and David Kamin, one could raise $4.5 to $5 trillion over 10 years through such tax changes, directed at the top 1 percent, as the following: higher individual and corporate rates, higher capital gains rate, realization at death, and higher rates plus lower exemption amounts under estate and gift taxes.

So it's not just about the revenue. That said, there are 2 main types of arguments for using a VAT in lieu of (or in addition to) the above alternatives. The first are arguments about efficiency and economic growth, while the latter are arguments about political feasibility.

I myself, if made the temporary fiscal tsar with some hope that my choices would persist, would add a VAT to the mix, for reasons of both (relative) efficiency and long-term political economy. But I would also revisit the existing and other proposed taxes in order to ensure that overall progressivity (giving due weight to concerns about efficiency and growth) was at the level, or achieved the set of tradeoffs, that I considered best. But, since no fiscal tsar job appears to be on offer for me at present, I don't see the need fully to decide and specify exactly what I would hypothetically do.