Taxes connect us to one another, to the common good, and to the future. This is a book about taxes: who pays what and who gets what. More than that, it’s about the role of government, about citizenship and our collective well-being, about the Canada we want. The contributors, leading Canadian practitioners and scholars, explore how taxes have become a political “no-go zone” and how changes in taxation are changing Canada. They challenge the view that any tax is a bad tax and provide broad directions for fairer and smarter approaches. This is a book that will be of interest to anyone concerned with public policy and public affairs, economics, and political science and to anyone interested in challenging the conventional wisdom that lower taxes and smaller government are the cures to what ails us.
Things have never been worse for California and its citizens, and Liberalism is to blame. In Taxifornia, James V. Lacy identifies and examines California's “one-party” domination of the liberal faction of the California Democratic Party and their union and environmental lobby cronies as the cause of California's rotting economy, and how all Americans are losing as a result. Liberalism is to blame for California's rotting economy. The biggest and most important state in America was once a land of opportunity in a wonderful climate. But times have surely changed. Things have never been worse for California and its citizens. California's “one-party” domination of the liberal faction of the California Democratic Party and their union and environmental lobby cronies have wrecked havoc on California, and all Americans are losing as a result. In Taxifornia, James V. Lacy identifies and examines the true causes of California’s decline. Californians are victims of the heaviest taxation in all of America, and those high taxes are now steadily destroying the state’s economy. Tax-and-spend liberals who are in control have created a state that taxes and regulates more than any other state in the country, and have engineered a rotting economy with among the highest unemployment of any state in the nation. Its high taxes hurt all Californians by making the state too expensive for business to turn profitable. Business flight has become endemic. California’s over-regulation of businesses depresses employment in the state. A widely accepted tenet among liberal politicians, political science academics, and the media in California is that no development at all is a good thing. It is a state that educates the worst but pays the best to its teachers, a place that is widely considered by most CEOs to be one of the worst locations in the nation to run a business, where local governments are going bankrupt, and where an out-of-control public employee pay and pension system threatens to gobble up and divert almost all available taxpayer resources to a point where cities and counties simply cannot afford to pay for police, fire, or road maintenance anymore. California has an outdated environmental policy and an energy policy that makes the state almost totally dependent on one source of power: imported natural gas. It is a place where the public employee union worker who controls traffic in the Bay Area Rapid Transit District maintenance yard in poverty-stricken and near bankrupt Oakland is paid more annually than the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. Top leaders of the California Republican Party readily acknowledge their party is in very deep trouble. Jim Brulte, the state chairman of the GOP and a respected veteran of the California Legislature, has identified the source of the GOP's sorry condition as a "failure to recognize changing demographics" and has said that Republicans have been too reluctant to venture into communities outside of their traditional power base. "If we want to be successful, we have to get outside of our comfort zone," Brulte said. "Too many Republican Party leaders or Republican elected officials spend all their time talking to the choir." Having identified the problems correctly, Lacy offers observations--with over 800 footnotes--about what can be done to restore political balance in the state, as well as some rational ideas for how California can fix its economic problems. But the economic and political situation in California today is at such an extreme, whether California can ever return to the broad prosperity of the past and once again lead the nation, is a very open question.
This new and updated edition of The Flat Tax—called "the bible of the flat tax movement" by Forbes—explains what's wrong with our present tax system and offers a practical alternative. Hall and Rabushka set forth what many believe is the most fair, efficient, simple, and workable tax reform plan on the table: tax all income, once only, at a uniform rate of 19 percent.
We are well aware of the rise of the 1% as the rapid growth of economic inequality has put the majority of the world’s wealth in the pockets of fewer and fewer. One much-discussed solution to this imbalance is to significantly increase the rate at which we tax the wealthy. But with an enormous amount of the world’s wealth hidden in tax havens—in countries like Switzerland, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands—this wealth cannot be fully accounted for and taxed fairly. No one, from economists to bankers to politicians, has been able to quantify exactly how much of the world’s assets are currently hidden—until now. Gabriel Zucman is the first economist to offer reliable insight into the actual extent of the world’s money held in tax havens. And it’s staggering. In The Hidden Wealth of Nations, Zucman offers an inventive and sophisticated approach to quantifying how big the problem is, how tax havens work and are organized, and how we can begin to approach a solution. His research reveals that tax havens are a quickly growing danger to the world economy. In the past five years, the amount of wealth in tax havens has increased over 25%—there has never been as much money held offshore as there is today. This hidden wealth accounts for at least $7.6 trillion, equivalent to 8% of the global financial assets of households. Fighting the notion that any attempts to vanquish tax havens are futile, since some countries will always offer more advantageous tax rates than others, as well the counter-argument that since the financial crisis tax havens have disappeared, Zucman shows how both sides are actually very wrong. In The Hidden Wealth of Nations he offers an ambitious agenda for reform, focused on ways in which countries can change the incentives of tax havens. Only by first understanding the enormity of the secret wealth can we begin to estimate the kind of actions that would force tax havens to give up their practices. Zucman’s work has quickly become the gold standard for quantifying the amount of the world’s assets held in havens. In this concise book, he lays out in approachable language how the international banking system works and the dangerous extent to which the large-scale evasion of taxes is undermining the global market as a whole. If we are to find a way to solve the problem of increasing inequality, The Hidden Wealth of Nations is essential reading.
This book deals with the federal income tax as it bears on gratuitous transfers and with the federal wealth transfer taxes. The federal wealth transfer taxes presently consist of a partially unified estate and gift tax and a generation-skipping tax. The federal transfer tax system is separate and apart from the federal income tax. Features: Emphasis on text, statutes, and regulations, rather than cases (especially cases that involve routine application of law to facts) "Building block" organization (simple to complex estates), rather than segmented organization according to Code sections. Extensive use of questions and problems to aid students High-profile authorship in Joseph M. Dodge (a highly regarded tax specialist), Wendy C. Gerzog, and Bridget J. Crawford (both well-established in the field) The book reconstitutes the Estate and Gift tax course from the ground up in light of modern estates practice. For example, special valuation rules are treated as basic, as opposed to being just "tacked on" as other books treat them. More emphasis on valuation and use of FLPs than in other books. Valuation is introduced early on and integrated with other material Integration of related income tax materials, including income taxation of estates and trusts Relation of tax doctrine to tax planning strategies Focus on doctrine that influences the practice of estate and trust law, rather than doctrine for its own sake Reference to state law (including recent developments) as it bears on transfer tax issues, with full coverage of issues raised by community property systems
In A Good Tax, tax expert Joan Youngman skillfully considers how to improve the operation of the property tax and supply the information that is often missing in public debate. She analyzes the legal, administrative, and political challenges to the property tax in the United States and offers recommendations for its improvement. The book is accessibly written for policy analysts and public officials who are dealing with specific property tax issues and for those concerned with property tax issues in general.
Taxation is a discipline that does not receive sufficient academic attention. It is typically viewed as a subset of law, accounting, public policy, economics, or finance. In this respect, most academic efforts in the field of taxation are shadowed by a mother discipline. There is currently an unprecedented need to approach tax pedagogy in a way that is independent of another discipline. This book caters to that real and unmet need in tax pedagogy. One of the book’s advantages is that it is not tied to a specific tax year and does not coddle the reader with volumes of time-sensitive information. In this book the tax year is never the focus, as the center stage is reserved for teaching the principles and skills necessary to independently find answers. The reader will learn to appreciate the complexity of the American tax system and will be endowed with the contextual understanding necessary to formulate educated opinions about how taxes work and, most importantly, why. Contrary to common belief, taxation in the United States has remained fairly stable for the last 100 years. This book uses the federal individual income tax as a vehicle to unveil the mechanics that make up the American tax system. This book is essential reading for students taking a first course in taxation, at the undergraduate or graduate level, as part of programs in accounting, law, public administration, or business at large.
