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How States Should Now Consider Expanding Sales Taxes to Services, Part 2
Get PDFAs we explained in our prior essay, state governments are experiencing severe revenue needs because of COVID-19, and expanding state sales tax bases to include services is a promising option for state governments to manage their budget shortfalls. In this, the second essay in this series — a contribution to Project SAFE: State Action in Fiscal Emergencies — we explain some of the implementation details and options for how states might go about expanding their sales tax bases to include services. In particular, we argue that there are some incremental steps that seem to be technically and politically feasible as responses to the current crisis.2 In particular, we argue the states should start by expanding their sales taxes to include services that are least problematic as a matter of policy and politics
Student Services Town Hall: Inspiration from a Distance
Get PDFDrawing on inspiration and the creativity of others has long been a hallmark of the Student Services Librarian. Never before, however, have we needed each other quite as much as we have during this wild ride of an academic year. Motivated both by a desire to bring us all together and out of our own need to find inspiration, the three of us hatched a plan to host a Student Services Town Hall.
We purposely scheduled the event far enough into the semester that some of us could report on successful (and not-so-successful) attempts to continue Student Services work during socially distanced in-person, hybrid, or completely remote fall semesters
The Postmodern Legal Ordering of the Economy
Get PDFThis article purports to show how the postmodern · tenets of particularity, reflexivity, decentralization, and pluralism map on to current legal forms and structures of market regulation. This is the case in the regulatory paradigm of shaping markets \u27\u27from within, the aspiration of which is to embed public and social values in the operations of private corporate actors, while expanding private corporate actors\u27 regulatory authority and scope of self-governance. As the state attempts to harness the regulatory potential of the social sphere to impose sanctions for corporate misconduct, the role of the law becomes to facilitate the permeability of private institutional structures to the pressures of the market and civil society-in short, law relies on and seeks to facilitate societal self-regulation. This mutation of the function of law reifies the asymmetries of social power in legal arrangements, while it eventually weakens the role of democratic politics as the principle of social ordering. At the same time, such new forms of market regulation do not challenge the structural inequalities encased in the original institutional setup of public and private legal infrastructure and thus fail to reconstitute market dynamics. The article questions the potential of the postmodern focus on particularity and pluralism to provide normative orientation for socially transformative projects against the backdrop of diffused private power, eventually attempting to trace new directions of critique at the intersection of law and political economy
Equalizing Parental Leave
Get PDFThe United States is the only developed country that fails to guarantee paid time off work to new parents. As a result, many new parents, particularly low-wage workers, are forced to go back to work within days or weeks of a birth or adoption. In recent years, a growing number of states have passed laws to address this gap in American labor policy, and in December 2019, Congress enacted legislation providing paid parental leave for most federal workers. This Article offers the first detailed analysis of these new laws, and it exposes how their structure—probably unintentionally—disadvantages sole-parent families.
In America, unlike most other countries, leave is provided on a sex-neutral basis as an individual benefit to each parent of a newly-born, newly-adopted, or newly-fostered child. This structure is intended to shift gender norms around caretaking within (different-sex) marriages, but it means that sole-parent families receive only half as much support. This is a significant problem, as forty percent of new mothers in the United States are unmarried. Under state family law, most single mothers—disproportionately poor and working-class women of color—bear sole legal responsibility for the care of their children, and many are functionally parenting on their own. The new laws are an important step forward from the prior baseline of no paid leave, but they shortchange the families that are likely to need them the most.
Prior theoretical and doctrinal assessments of equality in the context of parental leave discuss the relative merits of treating mothers and fathers identically, versus providing “special” supports to mothers. This focus obscures other important considerations, such as whether families or children are treated equally. Additionally, since women are far more likely than men to be single parents, privileging ideals of formal equality in this context has the practical effect of disadvantaging women. Drawing on models used in other countries, this Article proposes that sole parents should be eligible to receive an extended period of benefits or that a broader range of extended or chosen family members should be able to claim benefits to care for a new child. It also suggests that leave policies be structured to provide medical benefits separate from newborn bonding benefits. These changes would not unduly burden businesses, because the financing mechanism for these laws already spreads costs across the tax base. Without these proposed reforms, continued progress in encouraging fathers as well as mothers to take parental leave will further exacerbate the inequality between families with one parent and families with two
Bursting the Auto Loan Bubble in the Wake of COVID-19
Get PDFBefore the COVID-19 pandemic, auto loans outstanding in the United States had soared to record highs. The boom in lending spanned new and used cars and traditional and subprime loans. With loan delinquencies also hitting new highs almost every quarter, predictions that the auto lending market could burst soon abounded. When the economy came to a grinding halt and unemployment skyrocketed in the wake of the pandemic, auto lenders knew they were facing a crisis. Throughout 2020, auto lenders granted more payment forbearances to consumers, while slashing interest rates on new loans. Auto manufacturers similarly made promises to buyers, such as the ability to return new cars for up to a year upon job loss. Combined with the CARES Act’s relief rebates and moratoria, the bottom did not fall out of the auto loan market.
These measures, however, are temporary. The pandemic alone will not reduce people’s need for cars, but it will burst the auto loan bubble. The economic fallout will require interventions in the auto sale and loan markets, which presents a moment to transform America’s car economy. This symposium Essay details a range of financial and related measures that can be implemented in the near future to shift auto financing away from promoting economically unequal and environmentally unfriendly use and access to automobiles, and, more broadly, to shift the United States away from prioritizing automobiles as the primary means of personal transportation