Considering a Consumption Tax

A combination of electronic commerce and the Flat Tax could eliminate the IRS as we know it

Universal Health Care, American Pragmatism, and the Ethics of Health Policy: Questioning Political Efficacy

[Excerpt] “This article will explore the conceptual implications of applying ethical critique and analysis to health policy. This is not to imply any reductionist conception of health policy in which ethics is absent. As Deborah Stone and John W. Kingdon both note, policy is fraught with ethical implications, and value prioritization is a sine qua non for health policy. Nevertheless, I wish to suggest that there are some conceptually significant distinctions in thinking of the ethics of health policy as opposed to thinking separately about ethics and about health policy. Moreover, these distinctions themselves are of value, both in thinking about some of the most intractable problems of health policy, and in generating health policy that expressly presents its ethical bases, as opposed to masking the value assumptions and beliefs that underpin such policy.

Interest Elements in Tax Planning

This article discusses how interest has been and is being used in tax planning. The tax planning techniques using interest include charging too little interest or none at all, recalssifying interest as principal and allocating interest among time periods to optimize the tax consequences to the parties. The issues raised by these tax planning techniques go to the heart of the tax system. They suggest inadequacies in the development of the case law and in conventional tax thinking. The unifying principal is the divergence between the possible tax consequences and the clear economic consequences of each of the transactions. The overriding policy question is whether the tax system can deal adequately with issues involving the time value of money. The article discusses tax planning techniques through a series of propositions and a few hypothetical [sic] illustrating application of those propositions and raising questions about them. The article begins, however, with a review of some economic and tax fundamentals which provide the groundwork for the analysis