consumption tax – The Surly Subgroup

By: Leandra Lederman

This summer, the Indiana University Maurer School of Law and the University of Leeds School of Law will run a new Summer Tax Workshop Series. Dr. Leopoldo Parada from U. Leeds and I will host it. It will meet online via Zoom on Thursdays from 10:30am-noon Eastern time (3:30-5pm British Summer Time), starting May 21, 2020.

The Call for Papers opens today and will close on May 10, 2020 at midnight British Summer Time (7pm Eastern Daylight Time). If you are interested in presenting in the Workshop, please send the following before then to llederma@indiana.edu and L.Parada@leeds.ac.uk:

Your name, title, and affiliation.
The paper title and an Abstract of no more than 1,000 words.
Whether or not you already have a draft of the paper. (We expect to circulate a draft of each paper—at least 10 pages—a week in advance of each talk.)
Whether or not the paper has been accepted for publication.
A list of any Thursdays between May 28 and August 6 that you would not be available to present, or a statement that any Thursday in that date range would work for you.

Continue reading “Call for Papers for the Indiana/Leeds Summer Tax Workshop Series” →

halloween-candy1 By Sam Brunson

I was asked on Twitter about the Halloween Parent Tax. And with Halloween coming up, it seemed like it needed a post. So here you are:

Design Considerations

You’ve got a couple options here. Are you going to create an income tax? A consumption tax? A head tax? Each is slightly different, in certain relevant ways:

Income Tax: This is probably what you think of when you think of the Halloween Parent Tax. Essentially, children are required to give their parents some percentage of the candy they get. (My wife’s parents imposed a 15-percent Halloween Parent Tax when she was growing up.) There are some design complications here—for example, are you taking a percentage of the number of pieces of candy the kids get? Or do different kinds of candy have different values? And do you take size into account in calculating candy value?[fn1] Continue reading “The Halloween Parent Tax” →