State Tax Notes Announces New Quarterly Column: "Academic Perspectives on SALT"

Will Bring Scholarly Perspective To Key Issues In State and Local Taxation

FALLS CHURCH, Va., Dec. 19, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- State legislatures can easily circumvent special rules that are designed to limit tax increases because the term "tax increase" has no meaningful content, scholars David Gamage and Darien Shanske argue in the inaugural issue of "Academic Perspectives on SALT," a new column in the weekly magazine State Tax Notes.

"Special fiscal requirements are a common feature of state constitutions," according to Gamage, an assistant professor at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, and Shanske, an associate professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law.  One form of such requirements is what the authors call "tax increase limitations," or TILs.

Of TILs, they write, "It is well known that these regimes have questionable effectiveness, at least insofar as their goal is to curb the growth of government or even simply to change the pattern of government expenditures in the applicable state relative to other states not similarly constrained…

"Our key analytical observation," the authors continue, "is that TILs insert two conceptually vacuous notions – 'tax' and 'increase' – into the fiscal constitutions of the states that have them.  It is at least in part because this combination is incoherent that TILs do not work."

Gamage and Shanske plan to write their column on a quarterly basis and, with it, to bring a scholarly perspective to key issues in state and local taxation.

State Tax Notes is published by the non-profit Tax Analysts.  To read the inaugural edition of "Academic Perspectives on SALT" and to learn more about Tax Analysts, visit the Tax Analysts website at www.taxanalysts.com.

About Tax Analysts:

Tax Analysts is an influential provider of tax news and analysis for the global community.  More than 150,000 tax professionals in law and accounting firms, corporations, and government agencies rely on Tax Analysts' federal, state, and international content daily.  Key products include Tax Notes, Tax Notes Today, State Tax Notes, State Tax Today, and Worldwide Tax Daily. Tax Analysts' daily blog, Tax.com, was recently chosen by LexisNexis as the Top Tax Law Blog of 2011.  Founded in 1970 as a nonprofit organization, Tax Analysts has the industry's largest tax-dedicated correspondent staff with more than 250 domestic and international correspondents.

CONTACT:
Wendy Harris, 703 533-4404
[email protected]

Lawrence Haas, 202 257-9592
[email protected]

SOURCE Tax Analysts

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