Thursday, March 3, 2022
Kleiman Presents Impoverishment By Taxation In the present day At Duke
Ariel Jurow Kleiman (Loyola-L.A.; Google Scholar) presents Impoverishment by Taxation, 170 U. Pa. L. Rev. __ (2022), at Duke right this moment as a part of its Tax Coverage Seminar hosted by Lawrence Zelenak:
Considered within the mixture, the U.S. fiscal system is progressive, reduces inequality, and cuts poverty. The system improves on market outcomes by transferring revenue from wealthy to poor. But this hen’s eye view rings hole on the bottom, the place hundreds of thousands of low-income taxpayers throughout the USA are made poor or poorer by paying their state and federal taxes. In reality, whereas the U.S. fiscal system could also be broadly equalizing and poverty lowering, for a lot of struggling households, it’s impoverishing.
This Article gives a brand new method to measure taxation of low-income households in the USA, presenting an idea referred to as fiscal impoverishment. Taxpayers are fiscally impoverished when they’re made poor or poorer by paying state and federal taxes, after accounting for the offsetting money or near-cash public advantages they obtain. Distinct from the mixture and nameless measures by which we sometimes assess our tax and switch system, fiscal impoverishment is dynamic and individualized. It highlights particular person human dignity and implicates the financial obligations of the state vis-à-vis low-income taxpayers.
Along with introducing the idea, the Article sketches the scope of fiscal impoverishment all through the USA and recommends adopting impoverishment evaluation to information tax reform in any respect ranges of presidency. Utilizing stylized households, it explores internet tax burdens at numerous revenue ranges throughout all fifty states. Together with U.S. Treasury and Census knowledge, this work reveals that fiscal impoverishment is critical—affecting hundreds of thousands of households—and extremely variable—based mostly on a patchwork of federal and state tax and switch applications. Patterns of impoverishment monitor acquainted safety-net fault traces based mostly on household construction, employment, immigration standing, and state of residence. Lastly, discovering that such impoverishment exists, the Article offers particular reforms and a framework for rethinking taxation of poor households.
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2022/03/jurow-kleiman-presents-impoverishment-by-taxation-today-at-duke.html
