Adam Thimmesch (Nebraska), The Asymmetric State: The Urban-Rural Divide as Architect of U.S. Tax Policy (reviewing Kirk Stark, Taxation, Redistribution, and the Urban–Rural Divide, 78 Tax Law. 361 (2025))

Since 2020, many states have been cutting their income tax rates and narrowing their bases, while others have been considering wealth tax proposals and other progressive revenue tools. These divergent actions raise critical questions about modern fiscal federalism. When is subnational redistribution feasible? When does tax competition instead lock states into a uniform tax-cut script? And how does federal tax policy impact states’ choices?

Kirk Stark’s article, Taxation, Redistribution, and the Urban-Rural Divide, offers an interesting and useful evaluation of these questions by assessing modern fiscal federalism through a spatial lens built on insights from a variety of fields, including economic geography, U.S. history, and political science. His article recognizes that the traditional “textbook” model of fiscal federalism often dismisses subnational progressive taxation as implausible. The logic, rooted in the Tiebout model, is simple: if a state tries to “tax the rich,” the rich—or their mobile capital—will simply move. This understanding conventionally leaves the federal government to address equity and progressivity while states instead compete on service quality.

This story is, of course, incomplete in practice. Mobility is far from homogeneous, either interpersonally or interregionally. In addition, the ‘stickiness’ of urban markets is a known phenomenon in economic geography, which means that urban locations have greater power to impose taxes than the traditional account permits. Stark uses these insights to evaluate the reality of “asymmetric tax competition” between urban and rural states….