Tax Law And Racial Economic Justice

No study of Black people in America can be complete without considering how openly discriminatory tax laws helped establish a racial caste system in the United States, how they were designed to exclude blacks from lucrative markets and the voting franchise, and how tax laws extracted and redistributed vast sums of black wealth. Not only was slavery nearly a 100% tax on black labor, so too was Jim Crow apartheid and tax laws specified the peculiar institution as “negro slavery.” The first instances of affirmative action in the United States were tax laws designed to attract white men to the South. The nineteenth-century Federal Tariff indirectly redistributed perhaps a majority of the profits from slavery from the South to the North and is the principle reason the Confederate states seceded. The only constitutional amendment obtained by the Civil Rights Movement is the Twenty-Sixth Amendment abolishing poll taxes in federal elections. Blending traditional legal theory, neoclassical economics, and a pan-African view of history, these six interrelated essays on race and taxes demonstrate that, even in today’s supposedly post-racial society, there is no area of human activity where racial dynamics are absent.

This casebook provides a means to further the conversation between critical legal scholarship and law and economics. It addresses such issues as what economics can tell us about democracy and the law, what theories of justice can tell us about economic theory and the law, and why no legal language addressing class in the United States exists, and what such a language might look like. It uses the problem of racial and gender injustice as a basis to interrogate both critical theory and economic theory. The Second Edition provides a timely new chapter on the financial collapse, the turmoil in modern macroeconomic theory, and the economic justice claims of borrowers who received predatory loans. The coverage expands to include the following: Origins of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis The Racial Wealth Gap and HomeownershipIdentity and WealthGlobal Interconnectedness of Financial Institutions and The Paradox of domestic discriminationWhat Happened to Economics? The Turmoil in the economics discipline and its failure to predict the housing bubble and collapseThe Inequality Machine: Cashflow Waterfalls and Predatory Loans: Greenwich Financial Services v Countrywide MortgageThe Contract Claims vs the Economic Justice Claims Bonuses: Democracy and Contracts: Listening to the Outrage. What is Fair? City of Baltimore v Wells Fargo California v Countrywide MortgageResistance and Self-Help Squatters Judicial nullification of foreclosure enforcement actions MERS Litigation- How Electronic Efficiencies in Property Recordation Failed the Requisites of Property Formality.

Tax law is political. This book highlights and explains the major themes and methodologies of a group of scholars who challenge the traditional claim that tax law is neutral and unbiased. The contributors to this volume include pioneers in the field of critical tax theory, as well as key thinkers who have sustained and expanded the investigation into why the tax laws are the way they are and what impacts tax laws have on historically disempowered groups. This volume, assembled by two law professors who work in the field, is an accessible introduction to this new and growing body of scholarship. It is a resource not only for scholars and students in the fields of taxation and economics, but also for those who engage with critical race theory, feminist legal theory, queer theory, class-based analysis, and social justice generally. Tax is the one area of law that affects everyone in our society, and this book is crucial to understanding its impact.

A powerfully persuasive and thoroughly entertaining guide to the most effective way to un-rig the economy and fix inequality, from America's wealthiest “class traitors” The vast majority of Americans—71 percent—believe the economy is rigged in favor of the rich. Guess what? They’re right. How do you rig an economy? You start with the tax code. In Tax the Rich! former BlackRock executive Morris Pearl, the millionaire chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, and Erica Payne, the organization’s founder, take readers on an engaging and enlightening insider’s tour of the nation’s tax code, explaining exactly how “the rich”—and the politicians they control—manipulate the U.S. tax code to ensure the rich get richer, and everyone else is left holding the bag. Blunt and irreverent, Tax the Rich! unapologetically dismantles the “intellectual” justifications for a tax code that virtually guarantees destabilizing levels of inequality and consequent social unrest. Infographics, charts, cartoons, and lively characters including “the Werkhardts” and “the Slumps” make a complicated subject accessible (and, yes, sometimes even funny) and illuminate the practical reforms that can put America on the road to stability and shared prosperity before it’s too late. Never have the arguments in this book been more timely—or more important.

A groundbreaking exposé of racism in the American taxation system from a law professor and expert on tax policy NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND FORTUNE • “Important reading for those who want to understand how inequality is built into the bedrock of American society, and what a more equitable future might look like.”—Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist Dorothy A. Brown became a tax lawyer to get away from race. As a young black girl growing up in the South Bronx, she’d seen how racism limited the lives of her family and neighbors. Her law school classes offered a refreshing contrast: Tax law was about numbers, and the only color that mattered was green. But when Brown sat down to prepare tax returns for her parents, she found something strange: James and Dottie Brown, a plumber and a nurse, seemed to be paying an unusually high percentage of their income in taxes. When Brown became a law professor, she set out to understand why. In The Whiteness of Wealth, Brown draws on decades of cross-disciplinary research to show that tax law isn’t as color-blind as she’d once believed. She takes us into her adopted city of Atlanta, introducing us to families across the economic spectrum whose stories demonstrate how American tax law rewards the preferences and practices of white people while pushing black people further behind. From attending college to getting married to buying a home, black Americans find themselves at a financial disadvantage compared to their white peers. The results are an ever-increasing wealth gap and more black families shut out of the American dream. Solving the problem will require a wholesale rethinking of America’s tax code. But it will also require both black and white Americans to make different choices. This urgent, actionable book points the way forward.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

In a capitalist economy, taxes are more than a method of payment for government and public services. They are the most significant instrument by which the political system puts into practice a conception of economic justice. Yet there has been little effort to bring together important recent philosophical work on justice with vigorous debates about tax policy going on in national politics and public policy circles, in economics and law. The Myth of Ownership bridges this gap, offering the first book to explore tax policy from the standpoint of contemporary moral and political philosophy. Book jacket.

For the first time, Human Rights and Tax in an Unequal World brings together works by human rights and tax law experts, to illustrate the linkages between the two fields and to reveal their mutual relevance in tackling economic, social, and political inequalities. Against the backdrop of systemic corporate tax avoidance, the widespread use of tax havens, persistent pressures to embrace austerity policies, and growing gaps between the rich and poor, this book encourages readers to understand fiscal policy as human rights policy, with profound consequences for the wellbeing of citizens around the world. The essays collected examine where the foundational principles of tax law and human rights law intersect and diverge; discuss the cross-border nature and human rights impacts of abusive practices like tax avoidance and evasion; question the role of states in bringing transparency and accountability to tax policies and practices; highlight the responsibility of private sector actors for the consequences of tax laws; and critically evaluate certain domestic tax rules through the lens of equality and non-discrimination. The contributing scholars and practitioners explore how an international human rights framework can anchor debates around international tax reform and domestic fiscal consolidation in existing state obligations. They address what human rights law requires of state tax policies, and what a state's tax laws and loopholes mean for the enjoyment of human rights within and outside its borders. Ultimately, tax and human rights both turn on the relationship between the individual and the state, and thus both fields face crises as the social contract frays and populist, illiberal regimes are on the rise.