Daniel Shaviro (NYU) presents “The Rise, Fall, and Survival of the Haig-Simons Income Definition as a Policy Guide” at NYU’s Tax Policy and Public Finance Colloquium today. Daniel Hemel and David Kamin (also NYU) are providing comments. The posted draft does not have an abstract, but here is the description of the paper from the National Tax Association meeting (where it was presented also):

For academic tax lawyers as little as forty years ago, and leading public finance economists as little as sixty years ago, the Haig-Simons income definition was often treated as a canonical touchstone for making tax policy choices. Administrative considerations aside, it was widely believed that, to decide how X should be treated by the tax system, the main question one needed to answer was simply “What is the correct Haig-Simons treatment of X?” Today, by contrast, and for good reason, Haig-Simons is merely one item in the toolkit that may prove useful as an input to a full analysis. Reviewing the reasons for and process of this change is both interesting for its own sake, and relevant to how we should think about tax policy issues today.