Jeesoo Nam (USC; Google Scholar) presents Desert-Based Taxation today at Pepperdine, as part of its Tax Policy Workshop Series:

Across recent history, Congress has enacted multiple rounds of sweeping tax legislation—each round triggering a national debate about fiscal justice. But what exactly does it mean for a tax law to be just or unjust? To grapple with these complex policy questions, a robust theory of justice is essential.

The most intuitive understanding of justice is based on the notion of desert, the idea that people deserve things on the basis of what they have done and the government should arrange the laws so that people get what they deserve. For example, we may believe that many rich people do not deserve their wealth because they made their money through luck and that this gives us pro tanto reason to impose wealth taxes thereupon. Such views are deeply rooted not only in our internal understanding of justice, but also our public political discourse. Politicians and public commentators regularly appeal to desert to defend or criticize policies across a diverse range of areas.

Despite its intuitive appeal and pervasive influence on our public discourse, tax scholarship has largely neglected the notion of desert. This Article aims to fill this lacuna, meticulously spelling out what desert-based justice entails and how its principles can be translated into both substantive tax law and enforcement procedures. By uniting substantive law and enforcement under a single theory of justice, this Article recasts tax policy not as mere technocratic tinkering, but as a moral instrument demanding principled design.