The Social Boundaries of Corporate Taxation

Historically, the tax law distinction between corporate and conduit treatment drew primarily on doctrinal understandings, treating state-law corporations as corporate for tax purposes and classifying unincorporated legal entities based on their resemblance to conventional state-law corporations. More recently, commentators and Treasury have abandoned these doctrinal touchstones in favor of efficiency, broadly construed, as the guiding principle in determining an entity’s tax classification. This Article argues that, while important, efficiency considerations should not function as the sole arbiter of the boundary between corporate and conduit tax treatment. First, classical corporate taxation is, in many ways, deeply embedded within a larger network of legal and social meanings. Classical corporate taxation operates in concert with, rather than separately from, these legal and social meanings. For this reason, the rules governing entities’ tax classification should take these interrelationships into account, if not as a primary norm, then as a secondary consideration when empirical or other uncertainties preclude a clear choice based on efficiency. The social boundaries of corporate taxation refer to the extent to which these types of nontax considerations implicate the Code’s structural distinction between corporations and conduits. Second, efficiency is often conceptually tractable as a metric, but this intuitive appeal can mask significant empirical uncertainties about behavioral responses, especially if policymakers possess limited information, have difficulty reversing inapposite decisions, or face other constraints. In these situations, policymakers should take cues from the broader legal and social context in which tax law operates. Finally, by claiming that corporate tax law is situated in broader legal and social contexts, this Article does not attempt to validate or valorize the independent merit of these other contexts. Instead, this Article advocates consistency across policy areas — “fit” within the broader legal and social framework — rather than particular policy prescriptions

Comment, Failure to Pay Any Poll Tax or Other Tax : The Constitutionality of Tax Felon Disenfranchisement

If the government convicts a citizen under the tax evasion provisions of the Internal Revenue Code, some state disenfranchisement laws preclude that citizen — now a felon — from voting. In this sense, the right to vote depends on the payment of federal income taxes. The Constitution\u27s Twenty-Fourth Amendment, however, guarantees that the federal franchise “shall not be denied or abridged... by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.” If “other tax” includes income taxes, the text of the Twenty-fourth Amendment appears to prohibit the disenfranchisement of citizens convicted of tax felonies. This Comment argues that courts should construe the Twenty-Fourth Amendment narrowly to permit the disenfranchisement of tax felons — even though the Twenty-Fourth Amendment’s plain language precludes states from disenfranchising tax felons for federal elections

Tax Planning and Policy Drift

This Article proposes a framework for analyzing how private-sector legal interpretations influence public policy. Political scientists and legal scholars use the terms “bureaucratic drift” and “legislative drift” to describe how administrative agencies and future legislative coalitions affect public policy enacted by Congress. This Article identifies a third category of policy drift: “planning drift.” Planning drift describes deviations from an enacting legislature’s policy preferences that result from private experts’ interpretations of existing law. After Congress enacts a statute, the first people to interpret and apply the new legislation generally are not regulators or judges, but instead are private experts, such as lawyers, acting in the service of their clients. Although these experts’ interpretations do not have legal authority in a formal sense, this Article elaborates mechanisms through which these interpretations shape the course of public policy. Specifically, these interpretations give private experts a first-mover advantage in the interpretation of new legislation and affect the substance of subsequent legislative and bureaucratic interventions. Where private experts’ legal interpretations distort legislative policy preferences, Congress may have an incentive to limit planning drift. From Congress’s perspective, however, planning drift is not always undesirable. As this Article argues, Congress may tolerate or even welcome planning drift, depending on how it interacts with other types of policy drift and congressional politics and purpose. This Article concludes by outlining strategies that Congress could use to constrain planning drift where it is not desired. In an appendix, this Article illustrates planning drift using a detailed historical case study of the rules restricting “trafficking” in corporate tax losses

Discovery of Extreme Carbon Stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud

Using Spitzer IRAC and MIPS observations of the Large Magellanic Cloud, we have identified 13 objects that have extremely red mid-IR colors. Follow-up Spitzer IRS observations of seven of these sources reveal varying amounts of SiC and C2H2 absorption as well as the presence of a broad MgS feature in at least two cases, indicating that these are extreme carbon stars. Preliminary estimates find these objects have luminosities of (4-11) # 103 and L preliminary model fitting gives mass-loss rates between 4 # 10 5 and 2 # 10 4 M yr 1, higher than any known carbon- rich AGB star in the LMC. These spectral and physical properties require careful reconsideration of dust condensation and mass-loss processes for carbon stars in low-metallicity environments.This research was supported by NASA grants JPL1264494 and JPL1290956. We thank S. D. Points for obtaining the ISPI observations used in this Letter. This research has made use of the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France

Unusual Dust Emission from Planetary Nebulae in the Magellanic Clouds

We present a Spitzer Space Telescope spectroscopic study of a sample of 25 planetary nebulae in the Magellanic Clouds. The low-resolution modules are used to analyze the dust features present in the infrared spectra. This study complements a previous work by the same authors where the same sample was analyzed in terms of neon and sulfur abundances. Over half of the objects (14) show emission of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, typical of carbon-rich dust environments. We compare the hydrocarbon emission in our objects to those of Galactic HII regions and planetary nebulae, and LMC/SMC HII regions. Amorphous silicates are seen in just two objects, enforcing the now well-known-fact that oxygen-rich dust is less common at low metallicities. Besides these common features, some planetary nebulae show very unusual dust. Nine objects show a strong silicon carbide feature at 11um and twelve of them show magnesium sulfide emission starting at 25um. The high percentage of spectra with silicon carbide in the Magellanic Clouds is not common. Two objects show a broad band which may be attributed to hydrogenated amorphous carbon and weak low-excitation atomic lines. It is likely that these nebulae are very young. The spectra of the remaining eight nebulae are dominated by the emission of fine-structure lines with a weak continuum due to thermal emission of dust, although in a few cases the S/N in the spectra is low, and weak dust features may not have been detected.Comment: 13 pages, 2 tables, 7 figures, Accepted for publication in Ap

The mass-loss return from evolved stars to the Large Magellanic Cloud III. Dust properties for carbon-rich asymptotic giant branch stars

We present a 2Dust model for the dust shell around a LMC long-period variable (LPV) previously studied as part of the OGLE survey. OGLE LMC LPV 28579 (SAGE J051306.40-690946.3) is a carbon-rich asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star for which we have photometry and spectra from the Spitzer SAGE and SAGE-Spec programs along with UBVIJHK_s photometry. By modeling this source, we obtain a baseline set of dust properties to be used in the construction of a grid of models for carbon stars. We reproduce its spectral energy distribution using a mixture of AmC and SiC (15% by mass). The grain sizes are distributed according to the KMH model. The best-fit model has an optical depth of 0.28 for the shell at the peak of the SiC feature, with R_in~1430 R_sun or 4.4 R_star. The temperature at this inner radius is 1310 K. Assuming an expansion velocity of 10 km s^-1, we obtain a dust mass-loss rate of 2.5x10^-9 M_sun yr-1. We calculate a 15% variation in this rate by testing the fit sensitivity against variation in input parameters. We also present a simple model for the molecular gas in the extended atmosphere that could give rise to the 13.7 \mu m feature seen in the spectrum. We find that a combination of CO and C_2H_2 gas at an excitation temperature of about 1000 K and column densities of 3x10^21 cm^-2 and 10^19 cm^-2 respectively are able to reproduce the observations. Given that the excitation temperature is close to T_dust(R_in), most of the molecular contribution probably arises from the inner shell region. The luminosity corresponding to the first epoch of SAGE observations is 6580 L_sun. For an effective temperature of about 3000 K, this implies a stellar mass of 1.5-2 M_sun and an age of 1-2.5 Gyr. For a gas:dust ratio of 200, we obtain a gas mass-loss rate of 5.0x10^-7 M_sun yr^-1, consistent with the gas mass-loss rates estimated from the period, color and 8 \mu m flux of the source.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic

Amorphous alumina in the extended atmosphere of Alpha Orionis

In this paper we study the extended atmosphere of the late-type supergiant Alpha Orionis. Infrared spectroscopy of red supergiants reveals strong molecular bands, some of which do not originate in the photosphere but in a cooler layer of molecular material above it. Lately, these layers have been spatially resolved by near and mid-IR interferometry. In this paper, we try to reconcile the IR interferometric and ISO-SWS spectroscopic results on Alpha Orionis with a thorough modelling of the photosphere, molecular layer(s) and dust shell. From the ISO and near-IR interferometric observations, we find that Alpha Orionis has only a very low density water layer close above the photosphere. However, mid-IR interferometric observations and a narrow-slit N-band spectrum suggest much larger extra-photospheric opacity close to the photosphere at those wavelengths, even when taking into account the detached dust shell. We argue that this cannot be due to the water layer, and that another source of mid-IR opacity must be present. We show that this opacity source is probably neither molecular nor chromospheric. Rather, we present amorphous alumina (Al2O3) as the best candidate and discuss this hypothesis in the framework of dust-condensation scenarios.Comment: 15 pages, 18 figures, accepted for publication in A&

W Hya : molecular inventory by ISO-SWS

Infrared spectroscopy is a powerful tool to probe the inventory of solid state and molecular species in circumstellar ejecta. Here we analyse the infrared spectrum of the Asymptotic Giant Branch star W Hya, obtained by the Short and Long Wavelength Spectrometers on board of the Infrared Satellite Observatory. These spectra show evidence for the presence of amorphous silicates, aluminum oxide, and magnesium-iron oxide grains. We have modelled the spectral energy distribution using laboratory measured optical properties of these compounds and derive a total dust mass loss rate of 3E-10 Msol/yr. We find no satisfactory fit to the 13 micron dust emission feature and the identification of its carrier is still an open issue. We have also modelled the molecular absorption bands due to H2O, OH, CO, CO2, SiO, and SO2 and estimated the excitation temperatures for different bands which range from 300 to 3000K. It is clear that different molecules giving rise to these absorption bands originate from different gas layers. We present and analyse high resolution Fabry-Perot spectra of the three CO2 bands in the 15 micron region. In these data, the bands are resolved into individual Q-lines in emission, which allows the direct determination of the excitation temperature and column density of the emitting gas. This reveals the presence of a warm (about 450K) extended layer of CO2, somewhere between the photosphere and the dust formation zone. The gas in this layer is cooler than the 1000K CO2 gas responsible for the low-resolution absorption bands at 4.25 and 15 micron. The rotational and vibrational excitation temperatures derived from the individual Q-branch lines of CO2 are different (450K and 150K, respectively) so that the CO2 level population is not in LTE.Comment: To appear in Astronomy and Astrophysics A reference is adde