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Enforcement of nothingness yet again presents us uncomfortable theoretical terrain. This nothingness, firstly, is distinct from the nothing in the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ Yet, this question spurs on its inverse: ‘why is there nothing rather than something?’ This nothingness made visible in the references of Anti-Oedipus should be conceived of as an instant, an opening into both possibility and impossibility where something should be but is not. We could envision this nothingness as a bounded and bracketed omission and a void that could pull everything into its orbit. Omission in the case of the nothingness found in Deleuze and Guattari’s book is key; it is where something could have been, but is not. Moreover, it is where something should have been but is not.

Omission in this case can and should be understood as concomitant with the violence of anti-blackness. The opening of a space for an omission to then occur, a rendering into blankness, is not the opening of multiple possibilities for integration into the structure, practice and politics of citation, but rather as nothingness, a strange echo of partus sequiter ventrem. The blank space strangely visible in the text is not an erasure, which would suggest there was something there before that had been removed, blotted out, papered over or scrubbed away. Instead we might view the blankness, the nothingness as an irresistible vacuum, a black hole. It presents us with a peculiar puncture in the fabric of thought, which could pull everything into its orbit, which could deform everything around its edges. These edges around the nothingness of the missing citation, the nothingness that Jackson is considered if we follow the logic of even an unconscious disavowal of his work.

Is this what the global economy is coming to? Not yet. However, we are treading on dangerous waters already. The great recession of 2008 and its global consequences on growth, fiscal, and monetary policies did not only change our perspectives on how the economy works, they have created an alarming situation, whereas common sense and sound economic logic have been replaced by virtuous calls of destruction of a system that, although not without problems, has created the fastest growth, a reduction in poverty, and most widely distributed benefits known after the Middle Ages. We stress the word “virtuous” here: the many who have been speaking as economists with a sentiment of moral advantage and self-imposed but fake social compassion on the problems of others can be completely misleading—not on their intentions but on their anticipated results.1

The calls for increased taxation, global redistribution, higher regulation, more laws on how the economy should work, the war on global innovation, the proposed perpetuation of the failed welfare state cannot make and have not made a difference in the lives of those in need. What they have done, and will continue to do with force if these calls succeed, is to create powerful global monopolies, to reduce competition, to increase the size of the government, to promote corruption, to increase the chances that crises create a stream of new working poor.

But the journey these leading figures in wildlife protection have gone down, and the many authors they have drawn together, is still not fully complete. Both reports have highlighted how we are destroying our planet because our current tax and subsidy systems gives incentives to people to kill our wildlife, pollute and use land and natural resources inefficiently.

My personal campaign for the last 20 years has been to highlight this and promote rewilding, understanding that if we cannot tackle these issues, we will continue to lose wildlife no matter what social movements happen, wildlife protection laws are enacted or how many landowners we can win over to rewild their land.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerability of those who are inadequately covered by social protection in more and less developed countries alike, and has exacerbated the fragility of a social contract that was already under strain in many countries. A weak social contract in the context of an exceptional crisis poses a very real risk to social cohesion. Nevertheless, many States have reasserted themselves as the guarantor of rights by protecting public health and incomes. By sustaining these measures, economic recovery will be supported which will help minimize risks that may weaken social cohesion. However, this is a fast-moving, inherently unstable and protracted crisis. Social protection stands at a critical juncture. Decisive policy action will be required to strengthen social protection systems, including floors, as one of the cornerstones of a reinvigorated social contract.

Introduction

The development of artificial intelligence is nearing an inflection point such that improvements will be accelerating at exponential rates, increasing productivity and potentially putting millions out of work. Will that be a blessing or a curse, or both? Will the ranks of the long-term unemployed further deepen, or will advanced automation come to the rescue as the labor participation rate continues to fall, boomers retire, and the job market tightens? Will our tax, health, training, employment, income assistance, and other structures fit this new era? All these questions create public policy issues with enormous implications for employers.

Regarding the future of work, the debate is not about whether AI will cause displacement. Rather, it is about its extent, rapidity, and the solutions for its mitigation. Of even more importance, this displacement is not speculation by academics, screen writers, reporters and consultants. It is what business leaders themselves are saying.

For a given supply, the more inelastic the demand for a good, the smaller is the deadweight loss of imposing a tax. The ‘Ramsey rule’ states that more necessary goods should be taxed more heavily than goods with greater demand elasticities.11 This way the total excess burden caused by the introduction of the tax will be minimised: this tax structure would be economically efficient. ‘And extremely regressive!’, you may decry because the price-demand elasticity of a good is higher the more necessary the good, and it is the poor who tend to allocate a higher proportion of their income to ‘basic necessities’. Well, I said ‘under certain assumptions’, one of which is that the economic actor being model is a representative agent: all agents are assumed to be identical, so there are no distributional problems. If we assume there are, say, two groups of individuals—namely, the poor and the rich—and that the former have more inelastic demands because they tend to allocate a higher proportion of their lower income on necessities compared to the other group, Ramsey’s model highlights the tension between efficiency and equity that runs through much of the discussions in public finance and economic policy in general. As Mirrlees et al. (2011, p. 36) put it: ‘Optimal tax theory is all about the choice of a system of taxation that balances efficiency losses against the government’s desire for redistribution and the need to raise revenue.’

When it comes to efficient tax structures, a tailor-made tax on consumption that were able to distinguish between agents would be theoretically optimal: any two agents with different demand elasticities would be taxed differently. Butwhy restrict the analysis to the consumption of goods and services?Ramsey did not concentrate only on the demand side—after all, demand and supply are but the two blades of the same pair of scissors (Marshall 2013, V.III.7, p. 164). In fact, his basic insight was that—assuming linear and separable demand and supply schedules and the absence of income effects—the ratio between the unit tax on a good and its unit price must be equal to the sum of the inverse of the elasticity of demand and the inverse of the elasticity of supply; see Stiglitz (2015).

The definition of “tax” for constitutional purposes has become important in light of the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in NFIB v. Sebelius, in which Chief Justice Roberts for the Court upheld the constitutionality of the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act under the taxing power. This has led to commentators questioning the utility of Roberts’ distinction between a “tax” (where Congress’ power is almost unlimited) and a “regulation” (where Congress’ power under the Commerce Cause is limited).

We should make a very clear note at the outset: Tax law is a too broad term. It includes both provisions intended at raising revenue and provisions intended to regulate behavior. Personal income tax (PIT), corporate income tax (CIT) and even value added tax (VAT) laws include both type of provisions. Using the distinction that Prof. Stanley Surrey has proposed about 60 years ago, tax legislation includes both types of provisions; those that aimed at raising revenue in accordance with the tax base, and regulatory provisions as well ("tax expenditures"). In other words, almost any tax legislation includes both aspects. Hence referring to PIT means its base, and not necessarily all its code provisions. The purpose of this article is to draw this distinction and to use it for basic guidelines for constitutional judicial review over tax legislation.

Taxation has two well-known goals.5 Undoubtedly, as suggested by the first quotation above, the first and most widely accepted one is to raise revenue for necessary government functions. Although there is a broad debate about which governmental functions are truly indispensable, most commentators would agree that raising revenue is an indispensable feature of governments and that a government that is unable to collect taxes, like the Russian government almost was in 1998, is unlikely to survive.

The second and more controversial goal of taxation is redistribution. Most developed countries see the tax system as a way to redistribute income from the rich to the poor. The desirability of redistribution has been controversial, but most commentators agree that if redistribution is a legitimate government goal, then taxation may be the most effective way to achieve that goal.

A modern wealth tax can overcome these three weaknesses. First, offshore tax evasion can be fought more effectively today than in the past, thanks to a recent breakthrough in cross-border information exchange, and wealth taxes could be applied to expatriates (for at least some years), mitigating concerns about tax competition. The United States, moreover, has a citizenship-based tax system, making it much less vulnerable than other countries to mobility threats. Second, a comprehensive wealth tax base with a high exemption threshold and no preferential treatment for any asset classes can dramatically reduce avoidance possibilities. Third, leveraging modern information technology, it is possible for tax authorities to collect data on the market value of most forms of household wealth and use this information to prepopulate wealth tax returns, reducing evasion possibilities to a minimum. We also discuss how missing market valuations could be obtained by creating markets. In brief, the specific way in which wealth was taxed in a number of European countries is not the only possible way, and it is possible to do much better today.

A different approach to the justification of two-tier taxation was offered by Avi-Yonah, who has justified the concept of corporate taxation as a controlling mechanism for restraining excessive power held by contemporary corporations. 114 He claims that the normative concept of corporate income taxes has grown alongside the development of the corporate forms but those concepts ignored corporate changes. 115 He claims that corporations in our new world encompass wealth and power, and therefore, corporate tax should be justified on a regulatory basis. 116 Corporate tax may assist in controlling the massive power held by corporate managers. 117 Avi-Yonah, thus, argues that corporate tax can discipline managers operating multinational corporations. 118

<<FOOTNOTE 117 BEGINS>>

A highly progressive corporate tax structure would also address excess profits that derive from external crises like the coronavirus pandemic. Amazon, for example, has high profits in a normal year, but is likely to have even higher profits in 2020 because of the pandemic. In general, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Netflix all have high profit margins, especially if we disallow expensing R&D, which tends to reduce their taxable income and should not be expensed because it generates future profits, and if we tax them on worldwide profits so they cannot avoid tax by shifting profits offshore.23

Importantly, none of the big tech companies can easily escape a progressive U.S. corporate tax by inverting (that is, expatriating to another, more friendly jurisdiction) because under existing law, inversions are subject to an exit tax that would be prohibitively expensive for the controlling founders. As long as Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page control the big tech companies, and as long as they don’t want to pay 23.8 percent of their unrealized gains (that is, tens of billions in tax) to the IRS, the big tech companies are trapped. And if they are willing to pay the 23.8 percent, section 7874 should be revised to treat an inverted corporation as a U.S. corporation if it is managed and controlled from the United States or if it merges with a smaller foreign corporation, as the Obama administration had proposed.

Tax procedure covers a broad set of rules with varying functions. Some tax procedure rules have a “deterrent” function by encouraging taxpayers to comply with the tax laws. For instance, the civil penalties for failure to file returns or pay taxes,14 for accuracy-related underpayments,15 and for fraud16 encourage compliance by increasing a taxpayer’s expected cost from noncompliance.17 Other tax procedure rules have a “compensatory” function. The rules for interest charges on late payments of tax liabilities,18 for example, can be understood as compensating the government for the taxpayer’s use of its funds (much like private party interest compensates a bank for the borrower’s use of its loan proceeds). Other tax procedure rules—such as the statutes of limitations and the taxpayer appeal rights— advance general goals of procedural fairness, similar to in other areas of procedural law.19 Tax procedure rules may also be understood as having an explicit “revenue raising” function, since they can increase the final tax burden paid by taxpayer’s subject to these rules.20 Finally, some tax procedure rules have an “expressive” function in signaling the standards for taxpayer compliance and for fair treatment in tax administration.21

Finally, income taxation has an important symbolic value. To a large extent, current U.S. dissatisfaction with the income tax stems from the perception that it is not progressive enough - that is, that the rich can avoid paying their "fair share." 114 The result of this dissatisfaction has been attempts to ensure that the rich pay their "fair share" (like the AMT), and attempts to reduce opportunities and incentives for avoidance by broadening the tax base while reducing the top rate (the 1986 tax reform). Both of these may have failed, but the solution is not to abandon the effort to tax the rich by adopting a consumption tax. It is always hard to persuade the majority to pay their taxes when it is perceived that the wealthy minority do not pay theirs. A commitment to progressivity in taxation is an important symbolic bulwark for the legitimacy of the tax system as a whole.

III. Federal Tax Incentives Play an Important Role in Sustainability Efforts

Tax policy often includes consideration of the following principles: simplicity, transparency, certainty, convenience of payment, equity (fairness), and neutrality. 90 The principle of neutrality means that the effect of the tax law should have minimal effect on taxpayer behavior, 91 for the primary purpose of taxation is to raise revenue to pay for governmental services and functions. 92 In reality, tax laws are often designed to influence taxpayer behavior. 93

Our proposal offers three potential advantages over competing mechanisms aimed at bolstering engagements by shareholders. First, tax incentives constitute a far more effective tool for encouraging the growth of active funds and active participation in corporate matters than legislation or regulation that forces passive funds to become active. If a passive fund has no interest in assuming an active role in the management of a company, it is highly doubtful that legal mandates forcing engagement would achieve their desired goal of meaningful engagements. Worse yet, mandatory measures would necessitate significant expenditures on monitoring and enforcement. Tax benefits, by contrast, allow each category of funds, active and passive, to act as it prefers, while maintaining a stable market equilibrium between the two groups. Furthermore, tax instruments are flexible and dynamic. Unlike binary regulatory mechanisms, a tax benefit can be keyed to multiple performance indicators and can be adjusted to fit the changing magnitude of the positive externalities generated by sophisticated investors. 17

<<FOOTNOTE 17>>

Keeping the state’s individual mandate in place alongside the federal mandate beginning in 2014 would avoid all of the concerns detailed above that are associated with the elimination of the MCC standard. However, the potential for double penalties could be widely perceived as being unfair or overly punitive. The different penalties and their application under different circumstances—for example, an individual could satisfy the federal requirements but still face a state penalty—could create significant confusion, particularly if the federal government pursues strong public outreach and education related to the federal law as 2014 approaches. Relying on federally provided information, some households might believe they are complying with all relevant laws when in fact they are not meeting state requirements. Explaining the intersection of the two sets of rules and their components to a broad audience is likely to be challenging.

Therefore, due to the fact that this issue has not been sufficiently studied in the science of financial and tax law, it is difficult to make a clear distinction between the meanings of the concepts "object of taxation" and "tax object." At the same time, one should agree that the presence in the legal doctrine of the category "tax object" along with the object of taxation is necessary. In this connection, in this article the terms "object of taxation" and "tax object" are considered as synonyms. If you turn to property taxes, for example, to the tax on the property of individuals, then residential houses, apartments, rooms, car places, etc. with ownership of these objects are the object of taxation. In this context, it is rightly noted that the right of ownership, which is the basis of personal rights and freedoms, also serves the public interest of taxation. The object of land tax is land plots that are both in the ownership right and owned by taxpayers on the right of permanent (unlimited) use or the right of lifetime inheritable possession. If there is a right of gratuitous use of the land plot or its lease, which by definition are characterized by a much less stable legal relationship with the taxpayer, then the object of this tax is absent (Cockfield: 2002).

It is obvious that the tax base is regarded as a cost, quantitative, or physical characteristic of the object of taxation, which is determined for each tax independently. One cannot but agree with the opinion of scientists that the tax base is one of the tools of the State's tax policy, and this, in turn, allows the regulatory function of the tax to be realized.

The interactions summarized in Table 1 lead to a series of examples of double regulation and double counting (Sorrell, 2003c). Unless resolved, these interactions could lead to substantial economic impacts for the affected groups, and/or threaten the overall environmental integrity of the policy mix. For example:

organizations eligible for the energy tax will also face electricity price increases as a consequence of the generators participating in the EU ETS. Under a number of simplifying assumptions, 8 an EU ETS allowance price of €€7/ tCO2 could increase average electricity prices by some 0.7c€€ /kWh, which is approximately equivalent to the current level of the tax.

Take the quintessential example of a negative externality - some activity that spews CO<2> into the atmosphere thereby contributing to the global problem of climate change. If a fully cost-internalizing Pigovian tax (say, a carbon-based tax of the sort that many commentators have recently proposed) were imposed on domestic companies by the U.S. government, there obviously need not (and, from an efficiency perspective, should not) be a state-level carbon-based tax on the same polluters for the same carbon emissions. Nor should there be any overlapping command-and-control regulations or any other sort of regulation (including tort liability) designed to regulate the same conduct. It - the external harm caused by CO<2> emission - has, by assumption, already been fully regulated. Redundant regulation represents unnecessary administrative costs and potentially excessive deterrence. The same analysis can be applied to torts. Consider automobile accidents or product-related injuries or medical malpractice harms. All are potentially affected, at least in theory, by the same problem of overlapping, uncoordinated, and thus possibly redundant sanctions; this means either over-deterrence or duplicative and therefore excessive administrative costs, or both. Again, the literature has largely neglected this subject. 7

This complex mix of taxes, levies, obligations and subsidies sends out confused signals, creates unintended interactions and opportunities for double or treble counting. In particular no consistent ‘carbon price’ emerges, and the carbon prices reflected by these different mechanisms cover a wide range, between £216/tC02 for fuel duty (on the admittedly unsustainable assumption that 100 per cent of the fuel duty reflects climate change costs) and around £100/tCO2 for the Renewables Obligation, down to -£50/tCO2 (that is, a £50 ‘carbon subsidy’) through the reduced rate of VAT on domestic fuel and electricity.

As Steven Sorrell and Jos Slim comment,