Alex Raskolnikov (Columbia) presented Formal Equality and the Tax Structure at Notre Dame on October 27, 2025, as part of its Law & Economics Seminar:

Laws of affluent capitalist democracies share an important trait. With few notable but limited exceptions, these laws are formally equal—they make no formal distinctions between the rich and the poor. A multi-millionaire and a minimum wage worker alike can 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. Influential political and economic theories argue that formal equality is not just ubiquitous but foundational—it is a fundamental distinguishing trait of democratic capitalism.

This paper posits that formal equality is a meaningful constraint on policymaking in Western democracies and investigates the implications of this assumption for the design of the tax structure. 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 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.