The COVID-19 pandemic caused a sharp global economic decline. The U.S. government responded to the downturn with record fiscal legislation totaling over $5 trillion, which includes considerable tax relief. Most notably, the U.S. government distributed over $800 billion in three rounds of advanced refundable tax credits (known as recovery rebates, or stimulus checks) to most households. Tax relief has been unprecedented in scale but has often been the product of political circumstances rather than theorized conception. Tax relief thus remains largely undertheorized and politically motivated. This Article examines the U.S. tax policy response to the COVID-19 crisis, focusing on recovery rebates for individuals. It evaluates considerations for reforming tax relief and proposes several changes for future crises. First, the Article recommends targeting credits towards low-income households. This should be accomplished by decreasing phase out thresholds and increasing credit amounts. Second, the Article recommends targeting credits towards households which lost income or whose income did not substantially increase. This should be accomplished by implementing a recapture (repayment) requirement at the end of the tax year from households whose income increased beyond the phase out threshold, subject to a safe harbor. These proposals increase vertical equity and effectiveness, allow increased aid to those who suffered the most and enhance economic stimulus. Additionally, the Article explores arguments for universal benefits and recurring payments. It thereby examines the widely publicized debate on fiscal response to COVID-19 and suggests meaningful improvements to tax policy response for future crises.
{"title":"Tax Policy and COVID-19: An Argument for Targeted Crisis Relief","authors":"A. Harpaz","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3908056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3908056","url":null,"abstract":"The COVID-19 pandemic caused a sharp global economic decline. The U.S. government responded to the downturn with record fiscal legislation totaling over $5 trillion, which includes considerable tax relief. Most notably, the U.S. government distributed over $800 billion in three rounds of advanced refundable tax credits (known as recovery rebates, or stimulus checks) to most households. Tax relief has been unprecedented in scale but has often been the product of political circumstances rather than theorized conception. Tax relief thus remains largely undertheorized and politically motivated. This Article examines the U.S. tax policy response to the COVID-19 crisis, focusing on recovery rebates for individuals. It evaluates considerations for reforming tax relief and proposes several changes for future crises. First, the Article recommends targeting credits towards low-income households. This should be accomplished by decreasing phase out thresholds and increasing credit amounts. Second, the Article recommends targeting credits towards households which lost income or whose income did not substantially increase. This should be accomplished by implementing a recapture (repayment) requirement at the end of the tax year from households whose income increased beyond the phase out threshold, subject to a safe harbor. These proposals increase vertical equity and effectiveness, allow increased aid to those who suffered the most and enhance economic stimulus. Additionally, the Article explores arguments for universal benefits and recurring payments. It thereby examines the widely publicized debate on fiscal response to COVID-19 and suggests meaningful improvements to tax policy response for future crises.","PeriodicalId":303916,"journal":{"name":"ERPN: Public Policy (Other) (Law) (Sub-Topic)","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125415705","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2008-11-22DOI: 10.4337/9781848444027.00010
M. Krygier
If celebratory rhetoric is to be believed, or money devoted to a cause regarded as a sign of its success, ours is the era of the rule of law. No one will be heard to denounce it, leaders of countries all round the world claim to have it, vast sums are spent to spread it. But how is that to be done? Typically, programmes of rule of law promotion focus on state agencies, particularly legislatures and courts. Laws are enacted, judges trained, computers bought, libraries stacked with books, and still, far from atypically, the results are disappointing. This identification of the rule of law with state law is not news, nor should it be surprising. These observations are perhaps all truisms, but they are often ignored. We still await a sociology of the rule of law, while in the meantime we pour huge sums of money into inadequately grounded, if well meant, attempts to deliver it. Were we to seek such a sociology we would not have a huge number of sources. One place to start is the work of Philip Selznick. That recommendation is at large, and even in relation to this subject could refer to much of Selznick's work. In this essay, however, I will focus primarily on one book that raises these issues most centrally: Law, Society, and Industrial Justice. It has nothing specific to say about how to implant the rule of law in societies that lack it and have been little acquainted with it. However, those with such ambitions might well pause to attend to the sociological complexities this work reveals in a relatively modest proposal: to generate the rule of law in a well regulated domain of life, industrial relations, in one of the most rule of law rich countries in the world, the United States. Their reliance on state law, and ignorance of non-state law, might then come to acquire some recalibration. In a world full of lawyers and policy advisers propagating state-centered institutional recipes for the rule of law, and then affecting disappointment that benighted beneficiaries still violate or deliberately ignore it, a reminder of the complexity of non-state conditions for the rule of law might be salutary.
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Pub Date : 2008-10-31DOI: 10.5040/9781472564634.ch-003
M. Krygier
The concept of the rule of law is no new coin. It has long been the stuff of legal cliche, but also of extensive conceptual analysis and scholarly debate. The concept has a strong presence in legal theory and in traditions and branches of political theory. It has been less noticed or analyzed by social theorists, however, which is odd. That neglect is unfortunate, for some of the central questions about the rule of law are sociological ones. So my suggestion is that we would do well to explore a hardly existent sociology, the sociology of the rule of law. I provide nothing like that here, only some reasons to seek it. The argument is briefly this. The proper way to approach the rule of law is not to offer, as lawyers typically do, a list of characteristics of laws and legal institutions supposedly necessary, if not sufficient, for the rule of law to exist; let me call that the anatomical approach. Rather, one should begin with teleology and end with sociology. That is, I suggest we start by asking what we might want the rule of law for, by which I mean not external ends that it might serve, such as economic growth or democracy, but something like its telos, the point of the enterprise, goals internal to, immanent in the concept. Only then should we move to ask what sorts of things need to happen for us to achieve such a state of affairs, and only then move to ask what we need in order to get it. That third question, the bottom line, as it were, will of course involve legal institutions but it cannot be answered without looking beyond them to the societies in which they function, the ways they function there, and what else happens there which interacts with and affects the sway of law. For the rule of law to exist, still more to flourish and be secure, many things beside the law matter, and since societies differ in many ways, so will those things.
{"title":"The Rule of Law: Legality, Teleology, Sociology","authors":"M. Krygier","doi":"10.5040/9781472564634.ch-003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472564634.ch-003","url":null,"abstract":"The concept of the rule of law is no new coin. It has long been the stuff of legal cliche, but also of extensive conceptual analysis and scholarly debate. The concept has a strong presence in legal theory and in traditions and branches of political theory. It has been less noticed or analyzed by social theorists, however, which is odd. That neglect is unfortunate, for some of the central questions about the rule of law are sociological ones. So my suggestion is that we would do well to explore a hardly existent sociology, the sociology of the rule of law. I provide nothing like that here, only some reasons to seek it. The argument is briefly this. The proper way to approach the rule of law is not to offer, as lawyers typically do, a list of characteristics of laws and legal institutions supposedly necessary, if not sufficient, for the rule of law to exist; let me call that the anatomical approach. Rather, one should begin with teleology and end with sociology. That is, I suggest we start by asking what we might want the rule of law for, by which I mean not external ends that it might serve, such as economic growth or democracy, but something like its telos, the point of the enterprise, goals internal to, immanent in the concept. Only then should we move to ask what sorts of things need to happen for us to achieve such a state of affairs, and only then move to ask what we need in order to get it. That third question, the bottom line, as it were, will of course involve legal institutions but it cannot be answered without looking beyond them to the societies in which they function, the ways they function there, and what else happens there which interacts with and affects the sway of law. For the rule of law to exist, still more to flourish and be secure, many things beside the law matter, and since societies differ in many ways, so will those things.","PeriodicalId":303916,"journal":{"name":"ERPN: Public Policy (Other) (Law) (Sub-Topic)","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129056657","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We develop a model of vertical pricing in which an original manufacturer sets wholesale prices in two markets integrated at the distributor level by parallel imports (PI). In this context we show that if competition policy requires uniform wholesale prices across locations it would push retail prices toward convergence as transportation costs fall. However, these retail prices could be higher than those induced without restrictions on prices charged to distributors. Thus, the competition policy may not be optimal for consumer welfare.
{"title":"Wholesale Price Discrimination and Parallel Imports","authors":"Mattias Ganslandt, K. Maskus","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.968697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.968697","url":null,"abstract":"We develop a model of vertical pricing in which an original manufacturer sets wholesale prices in two markets integrated at the distributor level by parallel imports (PI). In this context we show that if competition policy requires uniform wholesale prices across locations it would push retail prices toward convergence as transportation costs fall. However, these retail prices could be higher than those induced without restrictions on prices charged to distributors. Thus, the competition policy may not be optimal for consumer welfare.","PeriodicalId":303916,"journal":{"name":"ERPN: Public Policy (Other) (Law) (Sub-Topic)","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114150768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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