Title: From Each According to His Ability?: An Analysis of Endowment Taxation and Potential Earnings
Abstract: This Article examines ability taxation, which is a tax on a person's earning ability or highest potential earnings, rather than earned income. Despite this regime’s favor as a theoretical ideal for fair and efficient taxation within public finance, and support from certain political philosophers and tax law scholars, insufficient effort has been made to provide an analysis of what “potential earnings” means. This Article explores competing understandings of this notion, and situates them within a multipart taxonomy. And in so doing, it unearths a tension at the core of the ability tax program involving a fundamental misalignment between the metaphysics (or correct conceptual analysis) of earning ability and the economics of its taxation. It concludes that once we correctly understand its requirements, we should reject ability taxation as a theoretical ideal on the grounds that it is overly burdensome and unfair to certain individuals
Publication Year: 2018
Publication Date: 2018-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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