University of Florida Press: Journals
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Theorizing Human Trafficking and Unfree Labor
No full textIn this article, we are dealing with human trafficking for reasons of labor exploitation. For us, it is important to look at the historicity of the reality of unfree labor, which for Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa, mostly means its connection to chattel slavery, the illegalization of unfree labor, and the development of the legal term of human trafficking and the introduction of laws against it. In looking at where today’s legal, social, and political reality is coming from, we are also able to deepen our critique of today’s law and its application
Blanchard, Peter. Fearful Vassals: Urban Elite Loyalty in the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata, 1776–1810.
No full textBook Review: Inventing Indigenism: Francisco Laso’s Image of Modern Peru
No full textReview of: Majluf, Natalia. Inventing Indigenism: Francisco Laso’s Image of Modern Peru. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021
Book Review: The Tricontinental Revolution: Third World Radicalism and the Cold War
No full textReview of: Parrott, R. Joseph, and Mark Atwood Lawrence, eds. The Tricontinental Revolution: Third World Radicalism and the Cold War. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022
Reliability of Post-Mortem Computed Tomography in Measuring Foramen Magnum Dimensions: A Pilot Study
No full textIntroduction: Reliability of foramen magnum dimensions using post-mortem computed tomography (PMCT) to obtain standardized measurements for biological profiling with interest in sexual dimorphism needs to be evaluated prior to a larger scale population-based study. Method: This was a retrospective cross-sectional study of 40 Malaysian adult decedent PMCT skulls. Standardized morphometric evaluation of two foramen magnum parameters, the foramen magnum anterior-posterior diameter (FMAPD) and transverse diameter (FMTD), were performed by three readers at two separate times. Statistical analysis included intraobserver and interobserver relative technical error of measurement (RTEM), coefficients of reliability (R), and t-test. Results: Error rates (RTEM) for FMAPD demonstrated intraobserver values of 3.65–3.84% (R = 0.73–0.75, substantial reliability) and interobserver values of 4.12–5.23% (R = 0.56–0.68, moderate to substantial reliability). Error rates (RTEM) for FMTD demonstrated intraobserver values between 4.52% and 5.00% (R = 0.57–0.70, moderate to substantial reliability) and interobserver values between 5.50% and 6.38% (R = 0.48–0.64, moderate to substantial reliability). Discussion: To improve precision of a population-based study, we recommend specialized operator training in the use of PMCT software, adequate sample size, clear landmark definitions, and consideration of population affinity as a confounder
The Agency Tax Costs of Mutual Funds
No full textIn the intermediated economy of the twenty-first century, retail mutual fund investors cede investment and voting decisions to institutional investors who manage the funds. As a result, actions undertaken unilaterally by financial intermediaries dictate the tax liability of passive individual investors. This Article argues that the tax decisions of institutional investors are guided by their own tax considerations rather than by the tax considerations of those beneficiaries who own mutual funds through conventional taxable accounts. Because these beneficiaries, unlike the institutional investors, are tax-sensitive, the diverging incentives give rise to agency tax costs.
These agency tax costs arise from the institutional investors’ trading decisions and stewardship activities, as well as their voting behavior. Because these investors regularly vote on corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&A), voting outcomes on these transactions are distorted. The structure of M&A deals, the method of payment used in such deals, and even premiums paid to sellers are skewed because the votes of passive tax-sensitive investors are cast by tax-insensitive institutional investors. As a result, institutional investors not only fail to replicate the tax outcomes that tax-sensitive investors could have achieved had they owned stock directly, but they also fail to achieve the same corporate voting outcomes. This Article proposes several options for mitigating agency tax costs. These options include mandatory separation of funds based on the tax profile of the beneficiaries, heightened tax disclosure by mutual funds, decentralization of votes in mutual fund sponsors and pass-through voting systems. These alternatives would reduce the agency tax costs of mutual funds without imposing new agency costs on tax-insensitive shareholders who also rely on institutional investors for portfolio management
Taxation at a Distance
No full textWealthy Americans escape the income and estate taxes by holding assets at a legal remove. This general tax avoidance strategy—holding wealth “at a distance”—takes several forms, but the most powerful of all is the use of life insurance. Tax law has come to afford special treatment to life insurance due to some combination of reasoned policy, industry lobbying, and illogical application of existing tax rules and judicial anti-abuse doctrines. Courts have only recently begun to push back against taxpayers’ use of life insurance as a tax-free brokerage account, but the judicial crackdown is fatally flawed. This is because it rests on what I call “control doctrines,” or arguments that taxpayers should only become liable for paying taxes on their life insurance investments when they exercise direct, personal control over those investments. But I argue that taxpayers can benefit from such arrangements without exercising any control, and that economic benefit is a more appropriate basis for tax liability. I show that applying an economic benefit principle would produce simple, administrable rules superior to the control-based status quo in both the income tax and estate tax settings. My argument demonstrates that tax law must reject extreme legal formalism—such as the legal “distance” created through life insurance and trusts—in order to meet the challenge of high-wealth exceptionalism
The Executive Compensation Threat to Retirement
No full textIn recent years a new phenomenon has appeared on the retirement savings landscape: the expansion into middle management ranks of a traditional tool of executive compensation, the so-called “top hat” pension plan. Top hat plans are unfunded deferred compensation programs for a “select group of management or highly compensated employees.” Properly structured, top hat plans amass retirement resources that are taxed to employee-participants only when distributed. From the participant’s viewpoint, that delayed inclusion appears comparable to the tax deferral accorded qualified retirement plan savings, yet top hat plans are exempt from all of the Code’s qualification conditions. They are likewise excused from virtually all of ERISA’s pension plan participant protections, including vesting, funding and fiduciary responsibilities.
This regulatory immunity licenses three interconnected pathologies that undermine core retirement policy objectives. The inapplicability of ERISA’s worker protections, combined with preemption of state law, relegates top hat plan participants to a uniquely precarious position: their retirement savings are more exposed to depredation and vulnerable to loss than if ERISA had never been enacted. The inapplicability of the Code’s qualified plan nondiscrimination requirements allows employers to offer additional retirement savings to highly-paid managerial, technical and professional employees without having to pay comparable benefits to rank-and-file workers. And the dramatic disparity, post-2017, between income tax rates applicable to corporations and high-incomeindividuals incentivizes that favoritism with a substantial tax subsidy that is unmeasured and generally overlooked.
This article explores the unresolved ambiguity that has enabled top hat plan metastasis into upper-middle compensation ranges. It documents the sources of the pathologies associated with the expansion of top hat pensions and traces their consequences. And it surveys the leading responses to these developments, some of which offer only partial solutions, while others could be accomplished only by legislation
Reimagining a U.S. Corporate Tax Increase as a Supplemental Subtraction VAT
No full textThe U.S. federal government raises tax revenue almost exclusively through income taxes, both corporate and individual, whereas its trading partners and competitors rely for their national revenue on both income taxes and “destination based” value added taxes (VATs), which are not imposed on exports but are imposed on imports. As a result, U.S. corporations, which are subject to U.S. corporate income tax, may be at a serious trade disadvantage to competitor non-U.S. corporations with respect to both U.S. domestic sales and foreign sales, if the U.S. corporate income tax exceeds the foreign country’s income tax imposed on those competitors.
The Biden administration has proposed raising the tax rate on U.S. corporate income from its current 21 percent to 25 percent and perhaps even more likely to 28 percent. The proposed rate increase faces substantial Republican opposition. The opposition to the proposed rate increase argues that such an increase will chase business offshore and put the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage in attracting business and selling products both in the U.S. and abroad that compete with foreign products. The problem, simply put, is that foreign countries rely on VATs and can afford to maintain lower corporate income tax rates than otherwise, but the U.S. does not have a supplemental source of revenue like a VAT.
The issue of a competitive U.S. corporate income tax is not simply a current Biden/Republican tax rate disagreement about raising the U.S. corporate income tax. Rather, it is an issue about U.S. corporations having to compete with foreign corporations from countries that impose a lower income tax (and no VAT on exports) on those corporations than the U.S. imposes on its domestic corporations, and, further, that the U.S. cannot reciprocate by charging a lower income tax on its exports than on its domestic sales because of international treaty constraints. Thus, the issue reaches well beyond a proposed Biden administration corporate income tax increase, but rather to the structure of the U.S. business tax system of not having a VAT in some form as an integral part.
This Article considers revenue raising alternatives to supplement the current business income taxes and recommends that a subtraction VAT should be added to the corporate income tax as, at the very least, a step in keeping the corporate income tax competitive with the U.S.’s trading partner countries, perhaps as the long-term solution but perhaps as a first step to the adoption of a credit VAT to supplement the corporate income tax. In doing the foregoing, the Article compares the two types of business-level consumption taxes, the credit method VAT and the subtraction method VAT, relating them back to the most basic consumption tax, the retail sales tax. The Article argues that the subtraction method VAT, although not adopted by any other country, should be the choice because it can be added to the corporate income tax as a supplemental tax and can most easily coexist and be coordinated with that tax. It thereby allows for the easiest transition and is likely to be most acceptable to the public, which is well used to the corporate income tax and, as many observers believe, would be unwilling to adopt a credit method VAT, seeing it as a refined retail sales tax, which is a consumption tax imposed on individuals.
The Article then describes the proposed “Supplemental Subtraction VAT” that would supplement the tax on a corporation’s income and how it can be engrafted onto the existing corporate income tax to minimize the disruption to the current corporate income tax collection system. It then argues that the new supplemental subtraction VAT imposed on corporations, which would be destination-based, should be accepted as a VAT by the WTO and the U.S.’s trading partners for international tax and trade treaty purposes