Charlene Luke (Florida; Google Scholar), Tax Design for a Knowledge-Wealthy World (JOTWELL) (reviewing Omri Marian (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar), Taxing Knowledge, 47 BYU L. Rev. 511 (2022)):

In Taxing Knowledge, Omri Marian argues that taxing data-rich markets requires rejecting revenue taxation—not solely as carried out but in addition “in its optimum theoretical kind”—as the very best proxy for means to pay. As a substitute, Marian makes the novel suggestion that information itself “could also be a greater proxy” for means to pay, and he affords three basic options that ought to information “a reimagined tax on information.”

The article is wealthy intimately and is at its most persuasive in discussing the revenue taxation of enterprise entities. Drawing on the work of tax historians and students, Marian summarizes two dominant narratives explaining the origins of the company revenue tax: the company revenue tax as a proxy for shareholder revenue, and the company revenue tax as a method to rein in administration. Marian factors out that if company possession and administration is basically native and traceable, which it was “on the daybreak of company taxation,” then “whether or not the try was to focus on shareholders’ means to pay, or managerial curiosity, the taxation of company revenue made sense.”

On the horizon, nevertheless, was an ideal storm of globalization, dispersion, and “intangible-ization,” which, Marian asserts, “our data-rich economic system amplifies by orders of magnitude.” These forces have now so fully swamped the company revenue tax’s means to determine supply or possession and to measure worth that it’s time to “revisit our conceptual tax design.” …