Photo by NASA on Unsplash. The Group of Seven nations — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States — agreed on June 5, 2021 to promote a new global tax system. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) announced on July 1, 2021 that 130 of the 139 countries…
Tax Changes for Religious Organizations and Clergy in a Biden Presidency? Allen Calhoun Time will tell how much of President-elect Joe Biden’s tax proposal will become law in the next four years. The ease with which the Biden White House can implement its plans depends in part on which political party ends up in control…
Render Unto Caesar: Law, Religion, and Tax Allen Calhoun No area of law is more central to the interplay of religion and law than taxation. In his book The City of God, the theologian and philosopher St. Augustine famously questioned the difference between an empire and a band of robbers. Any faith traditions trying to…
Tax Law, Religion, and Justice: An Exploration of Theological Reflections on TaxationAllen Calhoun An Introduction by Allen Calhoun This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter forthcoming from Routledge/CRC Press in Tax Law, Religion, and Justice: An Exploration of Theological Reflections on Taxation on March 8, 2021, available online here. Why does the institution of taxation occupy…
—Part III— Parts I and II of this article surveyed the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates’ tax proposals, particularly those (like the wealth tax proposals) that seek to reduce economic inequality, and located those proposals in the history of tax philosophy. This Part III places that largely post-Enlightenment philosophy of taxation in dialogue with the longer…
Image from Pixabay —Part II— Part I of this article surveyed the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates’ tax plans and situated proposals for raising revenue and reducing the wealth gap in broader tax policy concerns. The proposals are revisiting two questions dormant since the early 1980s: (1) how should tax policy balance the dual concerns of…
Image from Pixabay —Part I— Many Christian theologians of the past two thousand years would likely have supported a wealth tax, but not for the reasons given by the current Democratic presidential candidates. Using the tax system to redistribute resources from the wealthy to the poor has been a matter of controversy in American history,…