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It must be noted that the strategy stands in stark contrast to the way in which the threat of domestic terrorism was addressed by the Trump administration, whose actions often served to inflame, and at times encourage, domestic extremists. On several occasions, President Donald Trump himself galvanized extremists and refrained from condemning acts of violence. Remarks following the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville and others encouraging the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” are just a few examples of Trump’s dog whistles. For four years, the holder of the highest political office in the United States subtly fanned the flames of organizations and ideologies that promote political violence and terrorism.

By contrast, the Biden administration seems earnest in its desire to counter this corrosive threat to American democracy, elevating domestic terrorism to a national security priority from day one. In his inauguration speech, the president noted “a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.” During his first day in office, Joe Biden requested a comprehensive threat assessment on violent domestic extremism and tapped a National Security Council counter-terrorism veteran as a special adviser to oversee a 100-day scoping effort on how to address the threat. The strategy, a first of its kind, is the result.

The story of the US economy in recent decades has been one of divergence between haves and have-not in multiple measures, from wealth to income.

A new research paper offers a wrinkle in the tale: Income inequality actually plateaued over the last decade, even as the key factors responsible for the gap have remained.

Gini Coefficient Trends. The single most common scalar measure of income inequality is the Gini Coefficient. Using our seven measures of income in Table 2 we report Gini values for peak years of all business cycles over the period 1959-2007 as well as for the most recent year of our data 2016. For all business cycle peak years and for 2016, Gini values are highest (most unequal) when we use our most restrictive income definitions—labor earnings or market income—and a tax unit as both our sharing unit and our unit of analysis and fall as we increasingly take into account government taxes and transfers.

This is reassuring since one of the goals of government tax and transfer policy is to transfer market income from Americans living in higher income households to Americans living in lower income households, and this occurred in all years. But what our new data set now shows is how Gini value trends have changed across each of these income measures since 1959. Focusing solely on the market income of tax units or the household size-adjusted market income of persons, Gini values increase over the period from 1959 to 1979—0.488 to 0.495 and 0.411 to 0.419 respectively. However, the reverse is the case when government in-cash transfers are taken into account. Gini values fall from 0.392 to 0.366. Gini values decline even more when using our preferred lower and upper bound measures of disposable income which fell from 0.362 to 0.304 and 0.350 to 0.288 respectively. Since 1979, income inequality has increased over all business cycles peak to peak years regardless of how we measure income. However, it is also the case that over the entire period from 1959 to 2007, income inequality has risen less, the fuller the measure of income chosen. As discussed previously, the current business cycle began in 2007 and is not yet complete since median income continued to grow from its business cycle trough up through 2016, our last year of data. Over the period 2007 through 2016 income inequality has also grown but it is still the case that this growth is slowest in our fuller measures of income.

Over the past couple of years there have been several firm-level studies on the effects of robot adoption in industrial settings. These papers all find that firms that adopt robots see an increase in employment. For example, a recent paper by Dixon, Hong, and Wu (2021) uses data on robot imports to identify Canadian firms that adopt robots.[1] They then compare employment, behavior, and performance between robot-adopting and non-adopting firms. They find that the robot-adopting firms experience a subsequent increase in employment and that the employment increase is predominantly from low-skill workers. As another example, Acemoglu, Lelarge, and Restrepo (2020) find that, among French manufacturing firms, those firms that adopted robots add jobs.[2] A similar finding is in a paper by Koch, Manulov, and Smolka (2019), who use firm level data from Spain.[3] These studies also find that the firms that adopt robots see an increase in performance (measured as an increase in firm-level total factor productivity or revenue). Interestingly, the studies find that the non-adopting firms in the same industry as the robot adopting firms see decreases in employment. This may be due to reallocation from slower-growing, more poorly-performing firms to faster-growing, better-performing firms. In some cases, the decreases in employment at the non-adopting firms more than outweigh the employment gains at the robot-adopting firms, causing a location- or industry-wide fall in employment (as shown for example in Acemoglu and Restrepo (2020)).[4]

There have also been papers on robot adoption in service settings. A paper studying the effects of robots on workers in Japanese nursing homes by Eggleston, Lee, and Iizuka (2021) finds that robots complement human labor and reduce labor turnover.[5] The physically demanding nature of work in nursing homes can often lead to high turnover, so robots in these settings are intentionally designed to assist with the most physically demanding tasks such as lifting patients out of beds. The paper also highlights an interesting feature of the Japanese setting: that many Japanese prefectures provide subsidies for nursing homes that adopt robots. If indeed robots complement human labor, then subsidies make sense and may help spur adoption of robots in these settings.

Jeff Falk, October 28 2020, “US wealth, income inequality has declined, Baker Institute expert finds,” Rice University, https://news.rice.edu/2020/10/28/us-wealth-income-inequality-has-declined-baker-institute-expert-finds-2/

Analysis of Federal Reserve survey data shows U.S. wealth inequality has declined for the first time in nearly 30 years, while income inequality has seen its largest decline in three decades, according to a new working paper from Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

Cutting a wide array of existing programs — such as the earned income tax credit (EITC), child tax credit (CTC), temporary assistance to needy families (TANF), supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP), and disability insurance — would cover only one-fifth of the cost of such a UBI and result in a massive loss of existing transfers to people with disabilities and families with children. This approach would exacerbate the needs of the most vulnerable members of society.

UBI doesn't address the automation problem

Whether it’s debates over a tax on billionaires in the U.S., or a broad effort to spread “common prosperity” in China, income inequality is often seen as a critical problem for governments to solve. Unequal economic outcomes are blamed for socioeconomic tension and populist disruption in the U.K., the U.S., Italy, and elsewhere.

But our research shows these diagnoses are gravely wrong. The core problem is not high income inequality, but the unfairness associated with low social mobility. Simple redistribution can’t solve this deficiency; in fact, a policy response focused on inequality may end up making the problem of mass discontent even worse.

This paper has used a household expenditure microdata set of unprecedented size to examine the distributional effects of the VAT in 27 OECD countries. It has followed a consistent microsimulation methodology across countries to ensure comparability of results.

Average tax rate results presented across disposable income and expenditure deciles broadly confirm the dichotomous results from previous smaller-scale studies: the VAT appears to be regressive when measured as a percentage of current income in all 27 countries, but appears generally either proportional or slightly progressive when measured as a percentage of current expenditure. The paper has illustrated the misleading effect of savings behaviour on results when measured as a percentage of income, showing that expenditure-based results provide a more reliable means of assessing the distributional effect of the VAT. Expenditure-based Kakwani progressivity index results confirm a low degree of progressivity in almost all countries, often extremely close to proportionality. The exceptions are Chile, Hungary, Latvia and New Zealand where a very small degree of regressivity is found.

A value-added tax (VAT) is a tax on consumption. Poorer households spend a larger proportion of their income. A VAT is therefore regressive if it is measured relative to current income and if it is introduced without other policy adjustments. A VAT is less regressive if measured relative to lifetime income.

Although a value-added tax (VAT) taxes goods and services at every stage of production and sale, the net economic burden is like that of a retail sales tax. Sales taxes create a wedge between the price paid by the final consumer and what the seller receives. Conceptually, the tax can either raise the total price (inclusive of the sales tax) paid by consumers or reduce the amount of business revenue available to compensate workers and investors. Theory and evidence suggest that the VAT is passed along to consumers via higher prices. Either way, the decline in real household income is the same regardless of whether prices rise (holding nominal incomes constant) or whether nominal incomes fall (holding the price level constant).

Before March of 2020, it was difficult to imagine what an implementation of UBI would look like. Then, over 22 million Americans filed for unemployment in the month of April alone. It’s important to note that the United States’ single $1200 conditional cash transfer to Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be considered a form of UBI. Though the United States failed to implement a long-lasting relief check for most of the country’s population, stimulus checks still garnered wide public approval. A recent poll conducted by OnePoll also demonstrated that, after receiving their first stimulus checks, 80 percent of those sampled believed that the economic impact payments should continue until the end of the pandemic. On the other hand, the Canadian COVID-19 Economic Response Plan, similar to plans in the majority of other countries facing economic crisis due to the pandemic, guaranteed checks for a larger portion of citizens than the U.S., with a plan to continue payments through the rest of the pandemic. Additionally, only six million Canadians filed for unemployment within April compared to the United States’ 22 million. Through the Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB), citizens who lost their jobs, faced income reduction, or were forced to stop working received $500 per week for up to 26 weeks. This recovery procedure is much closer to UBI than the United States’ response. Aside from the partisan divide between those within the Liberal Party who enacted the policy, and the Conservatives who argued that it lacked a commitment to fiscal restraint and failed to address the needs of “everyday Canadians,” most Canadian citizens were quite content with the package compared to the overwhelming disapproval in the United States. As the last few months have proven, UBI is not as disruptive to our normative system of government as one might assume. However, it is not enough. A consistent cash transfer alone will not remedy wealth and income inequality, the lack of access to adequate healthcare, and, overall, the government’s failure to redistribute tax dollars and provide a  financial safety net. Our current system offers an overly complicated tax process, yet insufficient social benefits to account for many Americans’ difficulties. In the long term, UBI is similar to a form of symbolic redistribution. A genuinely universal UBI program would not be ideal for the economy as a whole, as it presents a short-term solution to more long-term problems. Furthermore, without a wealth tax or a modernized form of NIT, UBI could hurt the economy and the working class more than it would help. An alternative would accurately target the least well-off. In conclusion, UBI has hardly progressed in concept since American revolutionary Thomas Paine originally proposed the idea in Agrarian Justice in 1797. The lack of implementation of UBI and the increasing complexity of the world’s economic systems tell us this: UBI is perceived as an idealistic, symbolic solution to income inequality that fails to address underlying issues. New policy proposals come mostly from former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14), who both identify as Democratic-Socialists. These progressive policies cover many aspects of social welfare: climate justice, Medicare, housing, and college for all, and eliminating student and medical debt. Thus, these policies provide a basic social safety net for Americans, while also offering a clear path for funding. All in all, UBI does not meet the same level of planning and support, rendering it a largely unrealistic approach. UBI would be an expensive and virtually useless program for the most vulnerable in our society—the poor, disabled, elderly, and youth.

Income inequality is often framed as the world’s foremost economic challenge, apparently responsible for populist eruptions like Donald Trump’s 2016 U.S. presidential election win, Brexit, and French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen’s popularity. Yet British politician Jeremy Corbyn’s far-left platform ran aground in the United Kingdom, the French left is comatose, and the U.S. Democrats’ left flank lost many Latino voters to Trump over perceptions of socialism. If inequality is such a big problem, why do politicians who preach aggressive redistribution keep failing at the ballot box?

Our book, which focuses on this question, was recently reviewed by sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo in a Foreign Policy article titled: “Does Inequality Provoke Populism?” Our thesis is that populism does not, in fact, chiefly result from income or wealth inequality but rather from economic unfairness. Confusing economic fairness with equality is what leads so many politicians to misunderstand and misdiagnose populism, delivering a big advantage to illiberal populist leaders.

While elements of UBI may be appealing in the abstract, in practice it's an inefficient, extremely expensive, and potentially harmful policy that would solve none of those three challenges. Let's start with concerns about the income gap in the US. If the goal is to design a progressive policy that better redistributes income, UBI is a terrible tool. Unlike programs crafted to specifically help people with low income and those with disabilities, a UBI program would, by design, spread payments across the widest possible base. This means that while the economically vulnerable would receive support, so too would middle- to upper-income families. Why give some money to everyone, rather than offer dedicated assistance to those who need it? Even if UBI payments were phased out and then capped for earners above a certain income, the program would still end up giving able-bodied working-age adults subsidies alongside families with low incomes, regardless of relative need. UBI by design fails to account for the elements of life that make families more or less in need of government support — such as having a child with a serious illness or a work-limiting disability oneself — and as such would result in a highly inefficient allocation of resources. Further, the likely fiscal costs of a UBI are staggering. Enacting a UBI that pays $10,000 to every US adult would distribute about $2.5 trillion in benefits each year. That's roughly 75% of the federal government's 2018 revenues. To fund a UBI program of this size, Congress would need to pass massive tax increases or spending cuts. Some proponents of UBI would fund the program, at least in part, by disbanding existing safety-net programs. This would be a disaster. Cutting a wide array of existing programs — such as the earned income tax credit (EITC), child tax credit (CTC), temporary assistance to needy families (TANF), supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP), and disability insurance — would cover only one-fifth of the cost of such a UBI and result in a massive loss of existing transfers to people with disabilities and families with children. This approach would exacerbate the needs of the most vulnerable members of society. Next, consider concerns about displaced workers and the threat of robots taking jobs. If the goal is to get people back to work, then UBI, again, is a terrible policy. Giving people unconditional cash payments does nothing to address the root causes of declining employment and wages among less educated people. Whereas a targeted wage subsidy would encourage work and increase take home pay, UBI discourages labor supply. Instead, we should spend money helping people invest in their own human capital and making it easier for them to get to work. We should spend money on promising career and technical education programs and help low-income workers pay for child care and transportation. All told, UBI is a sub-optimal and probably harmful policy response to all three of the challenges it purports to address. There are legitimate critiques to standard social safety net and welfare programs — they can be administered inefficiently and they aren't structured perfectly to fit the needs of today — but that doesn't mean they should be abandoned for a shiny policy idea taking Twitter by storm. Our country is facing serious and daunting economic challenges, and too many people feel left behind in today's modern capitalist economy. To address these challenges, we need to ground ourselves in reality by looking at the facts and designing programs that address the underlying problems. Candidates and policymakers should focus spending on targeted benefits and policies that support early-childhood education, skills training, subsidized daycare and housing, and other investments that support families and workers. Evidence shows that's much more likely to produce the desired social and economic outcomes for the American people than universal basic income.

Across all but 2 social policies, support was higher among those favoring a stronger governmental role in society relative to those favoring a weaker governmental role (Figure 1). For 2 unemployment policies—tax credits to businesses and public spending on construction projects—support was equally high for both. Other than these 2 policies, differences in support based on beliefs about the appropriate role of government persisted even in analyses including measures of political party affiliation (results not shown). We did not identify significant differences in support when comparing those living in states with the highest and the lowest case-fatality rates in early April 2020 (results not shown).

I focus on the US for two reasons. First, due to racialized politics, the negative stereotypes of welfare recipients are especially strong among American conservatives. As many conservatives believe that welfare programs disproportionately benefit Black Americans, they regard welfare with fundamental disdain (Gilens, 1999). Yet, the universality and unconditionality of UBI allow working classes of all races to benefit from the policy, thereby blurring racial lines. As such, UBI could potentially neutralize racial animus among conservative opponents, forming a basis for conservatives to be persuadable in reducing their opposition to UBI.

Among the income support policies, a majority supported an increased federal minimum wage (58%), but fewer supported universal basic income (39%). All of the unemployment policies had majority support, including expanding unemployment insurance benefits (52%), tax credits for businesses to retain and hire workers (66%), employment education and training programs (68%), and public spending on construction projects (71%).

When asked to gauge the role of government in society, 34% of the respondents favored the government taking “active steps in every area it can” relative to only 24% of the respondents in the 2019 pre-COVID-19 Gallup survey4 that used identical question wording.

The concept of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is turning up more often these days in debates over income inequality, poverty and the impact of automation on the labor force. It’s an old idea that traces back to Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and appears later in the writings of social philosophers such as Condorcet, Thomas Paine, Charles Fourier, and John Stuart Mills. In the 1960s, economist Milton Friedman proposed a “negative income tax” that would replace America’s patchwork system of social welfare programs with unconditional cash payments that would be enough to cover the basic costs of food and shelter for low income households. Friedman’s idea was the basis for the Family Assistance Program that was proposed (and then defeated) during the Nixon Administration. Recently the idea has drawn renewed interest because of skepticism about the effectiveness of aid programs in developing nations and concerns about workers who will be displaced in the near future by robots and artificial intelligence. Several countries around the world and several cities in the US have announced their interest in UBI, and some have launched experiments designed to test its feasibility.

For the most part, public opinion on the subject of UBI has been divided. A 2017 poll by Gallup found a near even split among American adults between those who support UBI (48%) and those who do not (52%). A Zogby Strategies poll done around the same time found 40% in favor of UBI, 35% opposed, and 25% undecided. A 2017 international survey by IPSOS found a more even split among Americans, with 38% in favor, 38% opposed and 24% undecided. Among other nations in the poll, support for UBI was found to be lowest in countries such as France (29%) and Spain (31%) and highest in Poland (60%) and Germany (52%). Switzerland is the only country that has had a national referendum on this issue. In 2016, voters there rejected a proposal to give each person a monthly cash allowance of 2,500 Swiss francs (about $2,000 US dollars when you factor in the cost of living) by a margin of nearly 3 to 1.

[*293] B. Broad Delegations to Independent Experts Congressional delegations to administrative agencies are commonplace in the modern Federal government. But the tax system has only infrequently relied on broad delegations: while there are instances in which Congress has delegated broadly in the tax code, 77tax legislation has generally consisted of Congress enacting extremely detailed tax statutes that leave little room for discretion to be exercised by Treasury or any other agency. 78Congress has been able to legislate with specificity and in high volumes without relying on delegation because of the institutional capacity it has developed in-house. 79 [*294] The first democracy avoidance technique is to introduce broad delegations into tax laws. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act featured a moderate version of this sort of delegation. As usual, the Department of Treasury was responsible for implementing the new tax law. But unlike most prior legislation, the law featured several exceptionally broad delegations that left Treasury with significant policymaking discretion. 80Although this move to broader delegations may have been incidental, it is consistent with other proposals that would move tax lawmaking even further towards significant delegations. Hines and Logue make an extended case for broader delegations of tax policymaking authority, arguing that tax policymaking should be entrusted to professional staff who have "political independence." 81Their most drastic proposal is for Congress to delegate authority to set tax rates to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors or to a similar sort of "independent" regulatory body. 82Their goal is to allow the Federal Reserve to coordinate fiscal policy, which has typically been the purview of Congress, with monetary policy, which has long been reserved for the independent Federal Reserve Board. 83 [*295] Hines and Logue describe their proposal to give the Federal Reserve tax rate-setting authority as empowering it to fight economic contractions by "precommit[ting] to an optimal policy plan over time, which Congress notoriously struggles to do." 84Delegation would serve as a bulwark against what they see as inappropriate meddling and tinkering by Congress. 85For example, a high-profile example of the problem they seek to avoid might be Congress' notorious inability to sustain base-broadening, rate-reducing "tax reform" of the sort enacted in 1986. In that case, and in others, a base broadened by eliminating "loopholes" was quite promptly re-holed, and the broadly reduced rates crept back up. 86 They also argue that broad delegations to experts allow for policy changes that are more responsive to "changed circumstances." 87The concern here is that the legislative process is too cumbersome; for example, Congress may find itself unable to enact fiscal policy to meet the moment of turning economic cycles--in broad strokes, lower taxes in recessions, higher taxes in boom times. This second critique is the diametric opposite of the first one: their concerns seem to be that Congress is too quick to change policies when it shouldn't, but also not quick enough to change policies when it should. The unifying concern here, implicit in Hines and Logue's description of Congress's deficiencies, is about the influences to which Congress is responsive. In short, [*296] this is a public choice story: special interests push Congress in wrong directions, regardless of the circumstances. 88Delegation, they argue, could screen out some of these influences by transferring authority to better insulated bodies. Hines and Logue believe that the case for policymaking via delegation of this sort "is as strong with tax as elsewhere." 89The tax system, they argue, is missing out on specific benefits facilitated by delegation to agencies in the modern administrative state, namely reliance on expertise in policymaking settings that are shielded from political winds. 90They argue that the benefits of expertise accrue in other areas of law in which Congress makes broad delegations to administrative agencies--transportation, food and drug, environmental and health care, to name a few--should also be bestowed on tax policymaking. 91Although broad delegations that give agencies wide-ranging policy discretion raise some basic and well-recognized democratic concerns, [*297] non-tax scholars have confronted these issues extensively. 92But the goal of political independence runs contrary to a primary justification offered by administrative law and constitutional law scholars as to why broad delegations are permissible in the U.S.'s constitutional structure, namely that agency personnel are faithful to the politically accountable President. 93 Indeed, while there is an extensive literature on the importance of central bank independence and expertise, 94there is no similar body of literature or academic support for political independence in tax [*298] policy; Hines and Logue acknowledge that some elements of their proposals would be "unprecedented." 95 Further, the Federal Reserve is an outlier even among independent government agencies. 96Its features make it perhaps the most politically insulated piece of the Executive Branch, and have raised persistent questions about the constitutionality of its structure and the potential lack of democratic accountability for the decisions the Federal Reserve Board makes. 97Its members are protected from removal by the President by statute so that they do not feel obliged to follow administration policy; it has independent litigation authority, so does not need to rely on the Department of Justice to support its legal positions; 98it has its own source of funds so that it does not rely on Congress for annual appropriations; 99its regulatory actions are exempt from centralized review by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and its [*299] interactions with Congress are exempt from the sort of White House review to which departments and agencies are generally subject; 100and its multimember structure is thought to facilitate independent "deliberative decision making" and foster greater reliance on expertise. 101 Using the Federal Reserve to set tax rates would, by design, severely limit opportunities for public participation in tax policymaking. 102The authors acknowledge that "delegation arguably reduces the democratic nature of the system, undermining the legitimacy" of whatever policies are ultimately adopted--which they explain to mean that policies that are the product of this sort of broad delegation may lack public accountability, and thus may be judged to be illegitimate. 103They also recognize that the distributional effects of tax policy are "quintessentially political decision[s] entailing tradeoffs among different groups of taxpayers." 104 Nonetheless, the authors dismiss concerns related to democratic values as having been "overstated" by critics. 105They acknowledge that [*300] there are mechanisms included in the constitutional and institutional design of Congress that allow "voters to understand their representatives' contributions to legislation outcomes, and to a certain degree, why legislators voted the way they did," and they recognize that this facilitates accountability. 106That is, they acknowledge that Congress has some potential strengths in providing transparency and accountability. Additionally, they do defend delegation in part on grounds that there are some mechanisms for delegated decisions to reflect public preferences, via direct engagement with the rulemaking process and through the election of the President. 107 To be sure, there are various ways that broad delegations can be designed to cabin the authority of agency officials, and that decisions made by unelected bureaucrats can be made to be responsive to the public. Indeed, Hines and Logue offered that their proposal could be cabined if Congress specified the final distribution of the federal tax burden (thus limiting the Federal Reserve's discretion to change rates too differentially). 108Nonetheless, in federal tax law, more and broader delegations-whether it is rates to the Federal Reserve, or the contours of special tax provisions as seen in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act--means shifting decision making from elected officials to unelected officials, moving the decision making process and inputs farther from public view, and moving away from the possibility of electoral accountability for decisions.

[*281] I. WHY DEMOCRACY? A. Debate Among Democratic Theorists Among democratic theorists, there is a long-running debate about how to justify democracy--in short, what is democracy good for? The justification matters in practical terms, as the discussion in Part III of this Article will show. If democracy is a moral imperative--that is, there are rules and norms of decision making that must be followed without regard for results because, for example, shared decision making is required to respect equality-then sufficiently democratic procedures might be required regardless of the outcomes these procedures produce. 31On the other hand, if democracy is instrumental, then it is best measured by reference to the objectives it is oriented towards achieving, and by this view if democratic procedures fall short in terms of results then other less democratic procedures might be preferable. 32 The deontological justifications for democracy see its shared decision making and self-governance as required in order to, for example, protect individuals' liberty, allow for public reasoning among the governed, and to ensure equality among citizens. 33The democracy avoidance techniques addressed in Part III offend this justification for democratic decision making--they propose to compromise (or, from the current workings of Congress, further compromise) democratic norms in the name of specific tax policy goals. This approach discounts values like liberty and equality, rather than treating them as fundamental to humanity and uniquely intrinsic to democratic selfgovernance. As an alternative, other democratic theorists subscribe to consequentialist justifications for democracy. From the consequentialist perspective, democracy is good to the extent it delivers the best available [*282] outcomes. 34The broadest consequentialist approach accommodates some of the deontological justifications by attributing some value to things that flow from democratic decision making itself. This might include, for example, that democracy "enhance[s] the moral qualities of its citizens" by making them participate in decision making and causing them to be attentive to their fellow citizens' perspectives. 35There are also a host of consequentialist justifications that attribute value to the ways that democracy might enhance substantive outcomes. For example, some argue that the democratic process can organize diverse inputs from a broad range of people, or that in a representative system, democracy prompts the decision makers to "respond to the expressions of needs" of the population. 36These deontological justifications for democracy can be integrated into the consequentialist framework, so that if democracy has or produces independent value, that value can be considered along with other objectives. 37 But there is a more strict consequentialist approach as well, and this is the one with which the proposals critiqued in Part II are aligned. In this narrower version of consequentialism, the instrumental focus of democratic decisions is entirely turned toward external objectives. For example, Amartya Sen famously observed that there has never been a famine in a democracy. 38From a narrow consequentialist perspective focused on nourishment, this fact alone might justify democracy, but if an aristocracy could also avoid famines, or perhaps could produce consistently better nutrition outcomes, then perhaps aristocracy would be preferable to this imaginary and highly particular narrow consequentialist. Similarly, if a democratic structure yields the most efficient tax policies (a standard concern among tax experts), it might be judged [*283] through a narrow consequentialist lens to be the best decision making structure for tax policy. But if a different structure--say, a small group of experts-could develop more efficient tax policies, then that alternative decision making process would be justified. This approach focusing on efficiency without regard to the process does not attribute any intrinsic value to democratic structure. The predominant view among democracy scholars and legal scholars focused on democracy is that democratic decision making has intrinsic value and good consequences. 39Thus, among democratic theorists, a narrow consequentialist approach may be defensible but it is normatively freighted--the exclusion of democratic values and disregard of any intrinsic value in democratic decision making in this sort of evaluation is salient. As discussed in Part II, tax scholars focused on efficiency and equity have perhaps inadvertently removed democracy from their latent consequentialist equation, and mostly disregarded deontological justifications that would require democratic engagement.

[*273] INTRODUCTION When the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was signed into law in December 2017, it was the most significant amendment to U.S. federal tax law in more than three decades. 1The obvious question for taxpayers across the [*274] country was: How will it affect me? Surprisingly, the answer for most taxpayers was that they had no idea-to find out if they were better or worse off, individuals and businesses generally had to wait for more than a year until they actually prepared and filed their first returns under the new law. 2That meant that they did not really see how they were affected until months after election day for many of the members of Congress who advocated for and against the legislation. 3Transparency and accountability, both fundamental to democratic governance, 4were sorely lacking. 5 [*275] Many of the process-based objections to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act carried the taint of partisanship-- Democrats who opposed the bill complained, while Republicans celebrated. 6But just eight years earlier the partisan sides were flipped as Republicans lodged process complaints about the enactment of another hugely significant piece of tax legislation, the Affordable Care Act. 7There were some similarities between the two- each was the product of significant out-of-public-view wrangling, each included special provisions that benefitted powerful special interests, and each was enacted using the same distinctive procedural mechanisms that help to avoid extended public debate. 8Hence, the processes in each case gave their critics fodder for complaints on democratic process grounds. 9 American expectations of democratic control are arguably at their zenith when Congress exercises its constitutional power to tax (think: "no taxation without representation"). 10But, as experienced [*276] recently, modern tax lawmaking in the United States can feel divorced from the conduct of democratic governance. 11This perceived democratic deficit is not incidental. Rather, among tax policymakers and scholars, America's most democratic institutions and procedures are commonly approached as obstacles to implementing desired tax policies. 12At the federal level, democratic barriers are perceived to be erected in the halls [*277] of Congress, with its byzantine committee process, burdensome procedural hurdles, constant myopic focus on elections and reelections of members, and attentiveness to interest group lobbyists. 13To be sure, some of these features are anti-democratic by constitutional design or by political evolution, including bicameralism, the skewed representation of small states in the U.S. Senate, and legislative practices particularly in the Senate that allow a minority to shape the legislative agenda. 14 8 But some commentators have responded to the current state of fiscal policymaking by advocating for mechanisms that would further avoid or constrain democratic forces. This Article identifies a persistent undemocratic impulse in tax policymaking--an interest in bypassing democratic decision making to get to preferred policy outcomes--that has given rise to a host of democracy avoidance proposals. These proposals would work to enact desired tax policies by limiting who participates in tax policymaking, or by favoring certain participants in the process or certain normative perspectives. 15One proposal would insulate tax policymaking from political pressures by delegating tax rate setting authority to an independent body like the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Another would outsource new tax reform legislation to a panel of experts, in a posture so that their proposal would presumptively become law unless blocked by Congress. 16These sorts of approaches to tax lawmaking find support in public choice scholarship, which uses [*278] economic analysis to evaluate collective decision making 17and which has become a preferred lens among some tax scholars for analyzing the political economy of tax and other types of legislation. 18 This Article responds to the tendency of democracy avoidance in federal tax lawmaking in two respects. First, I place the phenomenon of democracy avoidance in a broader, ongoing debate among democratic theorists. 19Some democratic theorists argue that democratic decision making has its own moral force, regardless of how one might evaluate substantive decisions. From this perspective, democracy as a mode of decision making should be preferred and privileged even if the democratically chosen policies are undesirable in some respects. In short, as Amy Gutmann succinctly explained in an argument supporting a deliberative model of democratic decision making, "democracy is valuable for far more than its capacity to achieve correct outcomes." 20 In contrast, the democracy avoidance proposals identified in this Article are aligned with another strain of democratic theory, which posits that outcomes are the most important aspect of governance. 21From this perspective, democracy is preferable if it allows a society to make the best decisions for its community members; but, equally, if democracy does not deliver good results, other forms of decision making might be deemed preferable. By privileging specific tax policy outcomes that can be arrived at by insulating decision making from democratic forces, some of the advocates of the strategies described in this Article have placed tax policy as an issue that supersedes commitments to democratic governance. 22This Article seeks to introduce tax scholars and policymakers to this debate, 23and make clear that democracy avoidance [*279] proposals implicitly embrace the tradeoff of less democratic input in exchange for "better" tax policy outcomes. 24 Second, I offer several proposals to refocus tax lawmaking to value and benefit from democratic engagement (and to produce democratically legitimate tax policies) rather than avoiding democratic decision making and circumvent democratic institutions. While these proposals are a response to the democracy avoidance proposals critiqued earlier in the Article, they also could be implemented in ways that are consistent with some of the ideas that I critique--some of those specific proposals are not mutually exclusive with democratically legitimate decisionmaking. 25This approach places democracy as a central concern in tax lawmaking, not because of the resultant policies-- although there is interesting empirical and theoretical work supporting the idea that more democratically responsive policies may be better policies 26--but rather because it is important that community members perceive tax policies to be democratically legitimate. 27This Article seeks to shift tax policy debates to appreciate the value of democratic decision making to [*280] the tax system. The first volley, presented here, is to recommend reforms to the U.S. Federal tax lawmaking process to reorient it towards (rather than away from) democratic responsiveness. 28 The proposals, laid out in Part III, include the following: to counteract the uncertainty most taxpayers experienced with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that is a threat with any complex tax legislation, Congress should formally require, as part of the legislative process, detailed and publicly accessible analysis of how specific provisions affect typical taxpayers. 29This reform would rely on Congress's professional tax staff (housed in the Joint Committee on Taxation) to analyze the expected changes in tax liability for various typical taxpayers in each congressional districtperhaps the median individual filing as a single taxpayer, the median family of four, a small service-providing business, typical taxpayers from different racial groups or of different genders, and so on. Thus, before a congressperson voted on final legislation, he or she would receive a district-specific report (which would also be made public) showing the effects on variations of common taxpayers who are his or her constituents, based on demographics of the district and models of taxpayer responses. 30 The Article proceeds as follows: Part I introduces the debate among democratic theorists about how to value and justify democratic decision making, and whether and how to account for policy outcomes. This part also briefly introduces some features of democratic decision making that public choice theory generally sidelines, but that I argue should come to bear on tax policymaking institutions. Part II uncovers and examines the strain of democracy avoidance in tax lawmaking and tax scholarship, which I argue is rooted in public choice theory. In Part III, I propose four specific reforms that can bolster democratic legitimacy in federal tax policymaking in accordance with the framework. Part III also begins to consider what the vision of democratic tax policymaking presented here might mean in terms of substantive tax policy.

Reconceptualizing Performance Budgeting as Performance Budget Management

It should be noted that many of the foregoing recommended practices focus on activities controlled and managed by the executive branch. Although the legislative use of performance information in the budgetary process and the proactive engagement of the legislature in the development of performance goals and performance-budgeting strategies are important (OECD 2014; Park and Jang 2015; Podger 2018; Shaw 2016; White 2012), there is a long-held view that performance budgeting is primarily an executive budgeting tool for managerial and planning purposes (Jones and McCaffery 2010; Joyce 2003; Kelly and Rivenbark 2011; Lu 2007; Moynihan 2008). In the 1940s in the United States, performance-budgeting reform was not intended to change congressional budgeting, and throughout its history, the reform has seldom succeeded in doing so. Hence, the conceptualization of performance budgeting as an executive budgeting tool will probably remain more salient than a conceptual focus on its legislative use. The idea that performance budgeting may provide an alternative model of legislative decision making that trumps politics, gaming, and incremental logics is likely to continue to draw skepticism (Radin 2008; Raudla 2012; Wildavsky 1961). From this perspective, it is perhaps helpful for practitioners and the academic community to reconceptualize the practice of performance budgeting as “performance budget management” and focus more on the financial management aspects of the practice rather than on the legislative process and outcomes. PBM is about using the full budget cycle, from preparation, appropriation, and execution to evaluation, as a platform to achieve various managerial, budgetary, and policy-making purposes (see figure 2). Based on the From Performance Budgeting to Performance Budget Management: Theory and Practice 753 recommended practices, PBM activities should integrate multiyear budgetary planning and the assessment of long-term liabilities with policy planning so that policy makers and the budget office can be more informed about the short-term, near-term, and long-term financial risks faced by key policies and outcomes that the political leadership and the public hope to achieve. PBM also should link macro budgetary and policy planning with micro budget planning at the departmental and program levels so that departmental and program priorities and their budget requests are based on consideration of the macro budgetary constraints and the policy priorities of the executive and legislative leadership. In addition to integrating budgetary planning with policy planning, PBM needs to focus on “value for money” considerations, such as the efficiency, effectiveness, and public satisfaction of spending. This focus is more likely to occur at the subdepartmental program level, however, where decisions are less politicized, the outcomes and beneficiaries of spending can be more clearly defined, and the performance logics and the focal points of accountability of spending can be specified more easily (Blöndal et al. 2008; Castro 2009; Ho 2011; Park and Jang 2015). Further, even though there has been a growing emphasis on outcome-orientated budgeting, some legislators and citizens are still interested in monitoring how much tax money is spent on what activities. As a result, they may feel hesitant to delegate the detailed control function to another bureaucratic organization, such as the executive budget office or the auditor’s office. Based on this concern, performance-oriented program budget documentation is likely to coexist with traditional, input-oriented, line-item budgets in some governments (Schick 2014). Finally, under a system of PBM, departmental and program managers need to monitor spending progress and results regularly during the budget execution process. There also should be spending reviews conducted by departments and programs, probably on a rotating basis over a specified period of time so that the budget office and departmental leadership can evaluate the legality, allocative efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and necessity of spending. Occasional in-depth performance audits of selected spending programs by an independent, external entity, such as the auditor’s office, are also needed so that deficiencies, vulnerabilities, risk, and long-term sustainability concerns of spending programs can be identified and proactive remedial actions can be recommended to policy makers and budgeters. Figure 3 provides an example from the City of Olathe, Kansas, which has institutionalized a “threedimensional review” to “look back” at the effectiveness of spending, “look around” to benchmark performance results and learn from peer experiences, and to “look forward” to the future and integrate budget planning with the long-term vision and strategic planning of the community.

Delegators can also be explicit in the other direction: that is, to make clear that they do not divest themselves of authority. Most commonly, agency heads explicitly “reserve” authority to exercise the delegated power themselves. Sometimes they issue blanket reservations of authority. The Secretary of Transportation, for example, declares that “except as otherwise provided,” she “may exercise powers and duties delegated or assigned to officials other than the Secretary.” 95 Alternatively, subdelegations can also specify reservations for individual grants of power. The Secretary of Agriculture specifically reserves authority from a delegation to the Under Secretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs on issues “related to foreign agriculture” and for “[a]pproving export controls.” 96 Under these circumstances, courts generally decline to apply Accardi since the rule itself retains authority in the initial delegator.97 Between these two poles are a host of delegations that are ambiguous: they lack both clear reservations of authority and explicit intent to divest authority completely. Unfortunately, our dataset does not capture which delegations fall into each of these categories given the challenges of collecting and coding data on reservations of authority. Reservations, whether blanket or individual, are often placed in different parts of the Code of Federal Regulations and have idiosyncratic appearances in the Federal Register. They must be matched, often manually, with each delegated power through cross-references. Nevertheless, to try to get some sense of magnitude, we drew a random sample of 200 of the delegations in our dataset and found only two for which explicit reservations were present in the same Federal Register entries. Further, none of the 200 delegations in this sample included an express statement of divestment within the same entry. For these more ambiguous rules, judges will defer to the agency after deploying the ordinary tools of regulatory interpretation. 98