PETITIONS OF THE WEEK By Andrew Hamm on Jan 29, 2021 at 5:13 pm This week we highlight cert petitions that ask the Supreme Court to consider, among other things, whether the men-only draft is unlawful sex discrimination and whether law enforcement can compel testimony in the form of a phone passcode. The Military Selective […]
Nearly 90,000 Wisconsin small businesses that have taken out loans under the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) will face hundreds of millions of dollars in state income tax liability on those loans this spring, despite the loans being tax-free at the federal level. Unless the legislature acts, businesses that have received PPP loans and related […]
Imagine a mark-to-market capital gains tax, like the one proposed in New York, generating liability in a GameStop-style situation where retail investors have shares that have soared in value by orders of magnitude, get taxed on those gains, and then hold on too long and sell as the stock crashes back to earth. Whether you […]
What happens if you create a tax and its base is, for all intents and purposes, four people? If some Washington lawmakers had their way, we might find out. House Bill 1406 would impose a wealth tax exclusively on billionaires, accomplished by exempting the first $1 billion in household wealth. While most European countries have […]
SCOTUS Focus By Kalvis Golde and James Romoser on Jan 28, 2021 at 4:32 pm Elizabeth Prelogar, who will lead the Office of the Solicitor General under the Biden administration, argued cases before the court during her previous role in the office (Art Lien) “We didn’t change position in a single case. Not one.” That […]
Value-added taxes (VAT) make up approximately one-fifth of total tax revenues in Europe. However, European countries differ significantly in how efficiently they raise VAT revenues. One way to measure a country’s VAT efficiency is the VAT Gap. This measure looks at the difference between VAT revenue actually collected and collectable VAT revenue under an ideal […]
Newly published data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) shows that the first round of economic impact payments primarily benefited households earning less than $100,000. Lawmakers passed the first round of payments under the CARES Act in March 2020 and the Treasury Department began sending payments in early April 2020. The IRS sent more than […]
Ask the author By Gabriel Chin on Jan 27, 2021 at 10:23 am A rally before the Nov. 12, 2020, argument over the future of DACA (Victoria Pickering, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) The following is a series of questions posed by Professor Gabriel “Jack” Chin, University of California, Davis School of Law, to Professor Amanda Frost, […]
Event By Kalvis Golde on Jan 26, 2021 at 1:33 pm Senate control has some Democrats calling for reform (Kalvis Golde) In the immediate aftermath of the nomination of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court last October, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden promised, if elected, to create a bipartisan commission to study court reform […]
Key Findings Joe Biden has proposed an ambitious agenda that would make the federal fiscal system more progressive, and the huge budget deficits caused by the numerous COVID-19 relief packages could heighten the call for more tax revenues. What is needed are benchmark facts to guide these debates. A recent study by the Congressional Budget […]