Clint Wallace (South Carolina), A Democratic Perspective on Tax Regulation, 98 Wash. L. Rev. ___ (2023):

As democracies world wide have faltered, authorized students in fields as numerous as election legislation, labor legislation, and administrative legislation have turned to tax legislation to restore and assist democratic governments. Taxation presents a toolset properly geared up to handle considerations raised by democratic theorists centered on the circumstances that form a democratic group and assist it to flourish. Tax legal guidelines can rectify social dynamics characterised by financial inequality and may also help set up and strengthen civic establishments, amongst many doable interventions. However authorized students evaluating and designing tax insurance policies typically concentrate on the usual normative standards of effectivity, fairness, and administrability, with little particular regard for democratic considerations. This separation from democratic concept has left tax legislation students ill-equipped to answer requires assist from extra democracy-focused fields of legislation. Thus, tax scholarship largely has not engaged with the more and more essential venture of strengthening democratic governance.

This Article argues that democracy must be a extra central consideration in designing and evaluating tax legal guidelines in a democratic system of presidency, exploring a set of democracy standards that may bolster the usual normative standards used to judge tax coverage.

The democracy standards thought-about right here ask: does a change in tax guidelines strengthen or undermine democratic governance? This Article attracts on democratic concept to determine strain factors the place taxation would possibly form democracy, constructing on work by tax students who’ve tried to combine democratic values into the usual standards. I make the case that democratic concerns shouldn’t be subordinated to different standards, however somewhat ought to stand on their very own. I apply the democracy standards to wealth tax proposals, displaying how a democratic perspective illuminates a up to date debate in U.S. tax coverage.

Approached on this means, a democratic perspective on tax legislation and coverage can facilitate tax responses—in scholarly discourse and in coverage prescriptions—to present challenges dealing with democracies world wide, answering the calls of students in different fields who (appropriately) view tax guidelines as websites of essential potential interventions to shore up democracy.