Today's tenth Law, Society, and Taxation panel at the Law & Society Association Annual Meeting in Denver is on Conferring Valuable Social Benefits through the Tax System:
The government can spend money directly on an activity, or it can indirectly subsidize an activity by giving advantageous tax treatment to those who engage in the activity. Identifying and accounting for these "tax expenditures" have been an area of intense controversy for decades. The scholars on this panel will discuss whether tax expenditure analysis could ever be normatively neutral as well as offering analyses of some specific tax expenditures such as home mortgage deductions and benefits to low-income workers.
Brian Galle (Florida State) (Chair/Discussant)
- J. Clifton Fleming, Jr. (BYU) & Robert J. Peroni (Texas), A Critique of the Joint Committee's New Approach to Tax Expenditure Analysis:
The Staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation of the United States Congress has recently published a report which attempts to avoid the harshest criticisms of tax expenditure analysis (TEA) by propounding a version of TEA that does not rely on a normatively correct baseline concept of income. We believe that TEA cannot function without a normative baseline from which tax expenditures are found to deviate, that the proper baseline is the Schanz-Haig-Simons definition of income (which is based on the ability-to-pay principle), and that the Joint Committee report implicitly embraces these conclusions.
- Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.), The Boundaries of the Tax Definition of “Medical Care”: Classifying the Costs of Sex Reassignment Surgery:
This article will: (1) address the federal income tax classification of the costs of sex reassignment surgery as either deductible medical expenses or nondeductible cosmetic surgery costs (the issue in the pending Tax Court case, Commissioner v. O’Donnabhain); and (2) compare the tax classification of the costs of (a) fertility treatment, and (b) other medical treatment that facilitates sexual or reproductive functioning or reproductive choice.
- Kerry Ryan (Saint Louis), Human Capital and Transfer Taxation:
This paper will reconceptualize the gift tax exclusion for transfers relating to education and health care (Section 2503(e)) as transfers of human capital.
- Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis), The (Ignominious) Rise and (Predicted) Fall of the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction:
This paper examines the historical development of the home mortgage interest deduction, including its birth and subsequent evolution under the federal income tax, as well as its politicization over time and its relationship to other tax subsidies for homeownership.
