Alex Raskolnikov (Columbia) has posted to SSRN “Taxation and Formal Equality,” forthcoming in the Washington University Law Review. (We also had a nice email exchange about the right license to pick under SSRN’s new regime; I find the menu of options a little non-intuitive and I was interested to see what license Alex picked.) Here is the abstract:

Laws of contemporary capitalist democracies share an important trait: With few notable but limited exceptions, legal rules make no formal distinctions between the rich and the poor. A multi-millionaire and a minimum wage worker alike may cast only one vote, must stop at a red light, have to pay the same sales tax, and can send their kids to a public school for free. Such formal equality of modern legal regimes is no accident. Formal equality influenced ideas and laws of classical Greece and ancient Rome, it inspired Enlightenment thinkers, it motivated constitutional revisions in many American states, and it shapes contemporary proposals for egalitarian reforms. This Article posits that formal equality influences policymaking in liberal democracies and investigates the implications of this argument for the design of the tax-and-transfer system. These implications extend to the choice of tax base, the design of transfer programs, the timing of income recognition, the taxation of capital gains and inter-generational transfers, and a host of other tax and tax-adjacent policies ranging from corporate integration to the minimum wage. The overall lesson is that the constraints imposed by formal equality do not necessarily make the tax-and-transfer system less progressive, but they do shape the choices faced by the advocates of progressive tax reforms, today and in the future.