University of Florida Press: Journals
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Democracy Avoidance in Tax Lawmaking
No full textThe Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was the most significant tax law in more than three decades, but the strategy for getting it enacted included a variety of maneuvers to avoid public scrutiny. As a result, many taxpayers did not know how they would be affected until they filed their own tax returns more than a year later. This Article identifies this lack of transparency as part of a persistent pathology of avoiding and constraining democratic inputs and responsiveness in U.S. federal tax lawmaking. Indeed, some scholars and policymakers have sought to channel tax lawmaking away from democratically grounded decisions and towards prescribed outcomes, justifying these moves with strands of public choice theory that are expressly critical of democratic decision making. I critique this democracy avoidance approach to tax lawmaking, and make the case that tax law should be a product of mechanisms that provide greater transparency, accountability and responsiveness to advance democratic legitimacy.
I propose four reforms to tax lawmaking in the U.S. Congress to make resulting tax laws more democratically legitimate. One proposal is to require Congress to consider (and publicize) precisely how a proposed change in tax law is expected to affect different typical taxpayers, including taxpayers from each congressional district. This would allow actual taxpayers observing the lawmaking process to anticipate their treatment under a proposed law and in turn demand greater responsiveness to their real interests from their representatives. Other proposals build on this approach, calling for transparency as to the reasons why legislators support particular provisions and a radical—but, I argue, entirely achievable—reworking of the types of analysis produced in the federal tax legislative process for consumption by non-experts
Resolving the Conflicts of Citizenship Taxation: Two Proposals
No full textThe United States is the only country in the world to exercise taxing jurisdiction over the income of its citizens and long-term permanent residents, even when they reside abroad. This citizenship-based taxation (CBT) is controversial, especially among tax scholars, though there appears to be only limited political appetite for realigning U.S. tax jurisdiction to reach only domestic-source and domestic-resident income, as peer countries do. After reviewing the normative value of CBT and the existing multiple taxation mitigation measures, this Article presents two alternatives to the current U.S. regime. First, I propose the U.S. tax only the incomes of current-year residents and recent expatriates but exempt the foreign-source income of nonresident citizens after a five-year extended residency period in order to more closely correlate tax jurisdiction and nonresidents’ meaningful connections to the American taxing community. Recognizing that this may be politically infeasible, however, I propose that Congress uncap the existing foreign earned income exclusion in IRC § 911 for American expatriates living in high-tax countries, reducing their substantial compliance burdens without sacrificing revenue that would effectively be eliminated by the foreign tax credit or creating new opportunities for tax-motivated expatriations
Binding Constitutional History: Reverse Pollock and End Fatal Apportionment
No full textThe Constitution requires that direct taxes be apportioned among the states by population. The original purpose of the rule was to apportion direct taxes upon the states, that is, requisitions, to ensure that tax rates on wealth were equal across the states. Population was the best available measure of the relative wealth of the state. The Articles of Confederation had required apportionment of direct taxes by the relative value of real estate and improvements, but the system had failed because Congress could not control the manipulation of appraisal of value submitted by the states. Under the assumption that population measured wealth, per capita wealth was therefore assumed to be equal among the states, and a tax apportioned by population would therefore mean that tax rates on wealth would be equal across the states. Apportionment by population was thought out and debated under the Articles of Confederation, which allowed Congress to tax revenue only by requisitions upon the states. Where apportionment did not lead to uniform rates, or could not be reasonably applied, the tax was therefore not direct. Apportionment was written to be a just rule leading to equal rates on wealth and not a prohibition on federal use of a tax. When a base is not equal per capita, apportionment if applied would lead to higher tax rates in poorer states, which is the opposite of what the requirement was intended to accomplish
Ethiopian Orthodox Churches: Images and Commentary with a Translation from Danish of Excerpts from Thomas Boberg’s 2019 Autobiographical Novel Africana
No full textThe Danish poet and travel writer Thomas Boberg was born in 1960. During his childhood, Boberg lived in the inner part of the Østerbro district of Copen-hagen. As a teenager, he lived in Roskilde for some years, and he subse-quently lived abroad, based first in Barcelona, Spain, and later in Lima, Peru, before returning to the Copenhagen area to live. In 2021, Boberg moved his primary residence to the small Danish island of Fejø. In all, Boberg has spent eighteen years outside Denmark. He produced five volumes of travel memoirs before writing the “travel novel” Africana, which was inspired primarily by three journeys in Ethiopia of relatively brief duration and a stay of some months in the Gambia during the period 2013–2018. Boberg had spent time in the Horn of Africa already when he was in his twenties, and he undertook a journey to Sierra Leone in 2019 after Africana was published, thus following up on the time spent in West Africa in 2018. A substantial essay by Boberg describing the author’s experience in Sierra Leone, where he met and heard the life-story of a former child soldier in the civil war of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, was published in the Danish morning newspaper Information in two installments on January 3, 20204, and January 10, 20205, respectively
Strategies for Governing: Reinventing Public Administration for a Dangerous Century by Alasdair Roberts
No full textReview of:
Strategies for Governing: Reinventing Public Administration for a Dangerous Century by Alasdair Roberts. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. (197 pages, paperback
Military Veterans of the War on Terror: A New Generation of Congressional Foreign-Policy Advocacy
No full textThe number of US military veterans of the War on Terror (WoT) who were elected to Congress increased to its highest level ever in 2021. This trend reflects broader changes in the makeup of Congress, which now includes more gender, racial, ethnic, and religious diversity than ever before. This article bridges the literatures on socialization and civil-military relations with foreign-policy analyses of advocacy and entrepreneurship to study WoT veterans in Congress. This cohort of veterans represents a new generation with distinctive experiences that generally include more exposure to combat, more redeployments, and more post-traumatic stress diagnoses than previous generations of soldiers. Specifically, this study examines links between WoT veterans’ experiences and their adoption of creative strategies to achieve defense and foreign-policy objectives such as maintaining US commitments to operations in Syria and Afghanistan. Looking beyond roll-call voting with a multidimensional and diversified model of veteran legislative advocacy can enrich our understanding of today’s complex foreign-policy decision-making processes
Taiwan’s Changing Military Covenant and the Armed Forces’ Institutional Autonomy
No full textEvery country possessing an armed force has a military covenant: a set of shared, often implicit, expectations between the military and society. Derived from the social contract, the military covenant focuses on the willingness of soldiers to make sacrifices and forgo certain rights enjoyed by civilians in return for recognition of their important social role, fair treatment of them, and commensurate terms and conditions of service. This article uses the case of Taiwan to show how the military covenant in a new democracy emerges out of social, political, and economic forces and to specify some of the special difficulties of formulating a democratic covenant. It explains that the covenant is a form of relational (as opposed to transactional) contract marked by trust and a long-term future orientation. The article then extends the study of covenants to issues of motivation, readiness, and risk taking and offers insights for further research on military covenants
Finding the Empathetic Genre: A Critique of Love and Heroism in Mirza Waheed’s The Book of Gold Leaves
No full textEmpathy scholars not just show that when effortfully cultivated, empathy can be recruited for out-grouping, they also assert that literatures, through complex narrative building and perspective taking, can foster a reader’s willingness to simulate the thoughts/feelings of others. Nonetheless, these scholars insist that not all literatures have the same effect on readers. While some such as the romance (that seeks the union of lovers) are more suited for cross-cultural empathy, others like the heroic plot (that celebrates a hero’s ethnocentric victories) strengthen in-groupism. Adopting this theoretical framework, I examine Mirza Waheed’s The Book of Golden Leaves, a modern romance set in the backdrop of occupied Kashmir. The novel explores the Kashmir conflict from the perspectives of a local couple, Faiz and Roohi, as they negotiate their romantic union through obstacles including communal strife, their own ideological positions on Kashmir, and the broader political turmoil in the valley. My goal in this article is to see whether the novel, as a romance, can truly extend an empathetic view to the pain experienced by the diverse residents of the valley or whether it gets built into a heroic plot that ultimately favors a nationalistic political agenda (Indian or Pakistani). This study facilitates fresh ways of exploring empathy and literature and provides insights into understanding the Kashmir conflict
Interview with Hal H. Rennert, Editor-in-Chief of Delos 2015–201
No full textInterview with Delos editor emeritus Hal H. Rennert by Sylvie Blum-Rei
“The New Flower” by Thomas Boberg
No full textTranslation of the first chapter of the 2019 novel Africana by the Danish poet and writer Thomas Boberg, describing a visit to Addis Ababa as part of a journey in Africa undertaken with a Ghanian-Danish photographer (based on Rebecca Bannor-Addae)