Mar 3, 2019 Very Fakeditor
REVISED3: I am on alert for tax law changes as I teach Federal Income Tax this semester for the first time since the passage of the 2017 tax act. They seem to appear out of nowhere, rather than as part of a predictable pattern. What can explain seemingly disconnected provisions, scattered throughout the Code and enacted without an explicit policy explanation?
Linda Sugin takes on this question in The Social Meaning of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, published in 2018 at the Yale Law Journal Forum. Her critical perspective makes an effort to divine the worldview embedded in the TCJA based on the content of the enacted law. Sugin’s engineering effort shows the following “American priorities and values revealed by the TCJA:
- The traditional family is best;
- Individuals have greater entitlement to their capital than to their labor;
- People are autonomous individuals;
- Charity is for the rich; and
- Physical things are important.” (P. 404.)
Sugin reviews dozens of provisions to support her arguments. A sampling follows to offer a sense of her argument.
The TCJA, argues Sugin, reveals its traditional family bias through a number of provisions, including rate bracket changes and the replacement of the dependent care credit (helpful for two-working-parent families) with an increase in the generally-available child tax credit. Another change imposes a $500 fine on a tax preparer who fails to diligence a taxpayer’s claim of head of household status—a filing position designed to help low—and middle-income single-parent families. This last provision prompts tax preparers to be skeptical when a client says she is a single parent. No such incentive is presented when two clients say that they are married. Continue reading "OL Codes Test Two"
Mar 3, 2019 Very Fakeditor
REVISED: I am on alert for tax law changes as I teach Federal Income Tax this semester for the first time since the passage of the 2017 tax act. They seem to appear out of nowhere, rather than as part of a predictable pattern. What can explain seemingly disconnected provisions, scattered throughout the Code and enacted without an explicit policy explanation?
Linda Sugin takes on this question in The Social Meaning of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, published in 2018 at the Yale Law Journal Forum. Her critical perspective makes an effort to divine the worldview embedded in the TCJA based on the content of the enacted law. Sugin’s engineering effort shows the following “American priorities and values revealed by the TCJA:
- The traditional family is best;
- Individuals have greater entitlement to their capital than to their labor;
- People are autonomous individuals;
- Charity is for the rich; and
- Physical things are important.” (P. 404.)
Sugin reviews dozens of provisions to support her arguments. A sampling follows to offer a sense of her argument.
The TCJA, argues Sugin, reveals its traditional family bias through a number of provisions, including rate bracket changes and the replacement of the dependent care credit (helpful for two-working-parent families) with an increase in the generally-available child tax credit. Another change imposes a $500 fine on a tax preparer who fails to diligence a taxpayer’s claim of head of household status—a filing position designed to help low—and middle-income single-parent families. This last provision prompts tax preparers to be skeptical when a client says she is a single parent. No such incentive is presented when two clients say that they are married. Continue reading "Test Effect of OL tags"
Mar 1, 2019 Christopher WalkerAdministrative Law
Amy Semet,
An Empirical Examination of Agency Statutory Interpretation, 103
Minn. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2019), available at
SSRN.
Inspired by Lisa Bressman and Abbe Gluck’s pioneering empirical study on how congressional staffers approach drafting statutes, I spent months in 2013 surveying federal agency rule drafters on how they interpret statutes and draft regulations. Among its many methodological limitations, my study focused exclusively on agency rulemaking. Agencies, of course, interpret statutes in a variety of other regulatory contexts, including adjudication, enforcement, guidance, permitting, and monitoring—just to name a few. Indeed, it’s fair to say that most agency statutory interpretation takes place outside of the rulemaking context.
Thanks to an exciting new voice in administrative law, we now have some more light shining into this black box of agency statutory interpretation. In An Empirical Examination of Agency Statutory Interpretation, Amy Semet turns her attention to agency adjudication and, in particular, how the multi-member National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) approaches statutory interpretation. To conduct this empirical assessment, Semet reviews more than 7,000 cases that the NLRB heard over two dozen years (1993-2016) and three presidential administrations (Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama). This study provides a treasure trove of insights into agency statutory interpretation. Here are a few of the highlights: Continue reading "Looking Inside Multi-Member Agency Statutory Interpretation"
