Professor Rebecca Kysar Op-ed on Republican Tax Plan Appears in The New York Times
The Republican tax plan has promised simplification and a needed update, but G.O.P. policy choices are instead introducing even more complexity and threatening to leave America in the past, argues Professor Rebecca Kysar in her op-ed in the Nov. 15 edition of The New York Times.
Kysar explains how, despite widespread belief in both political parties that the tax code needs to be modernized, Republicans’ favoring of certain business activities—particularly in declining sectors such as manufacturing—will hurt the country by setting tax policies that “reflect a pre-digital, pre-global economy.”
“With their bill, (the Republicans) may well ensure that the United States economy is left behind once and for all,” Kysar writes. “Rather than driving the United States to be a competitive force in the 21st century, the Republicans’ plans hold the United States back in the last one.”
Another major issue, Kysar contends, is the plan’s bias toward financial, rather than human, capital—a choice she calls “out of step in a world of rising inequality.”
Kysar also highlights what she sees as major flaws in the plan’s proposed reform of the international tax system. Although efforts are supposed to reduce incentives for companies to move operations overseas, she says the bill—which would create a quasi-territorial system unlike any other in the world today—actually does the opposite.
“Instead of modernizing the taxation of business income, Republicans have doubled down on outdated concepts like corporate residence and origin of income that have become meaningless in a global and digital economy, while also attempting to preserve dying industries. The result is a dizzyingly complex system that will interfere with market forces.”
At the Law School, Kysar teaches and researches in the areas of federal income tax, international tax, and the federal budget and tax legislative processes. She is widely published in top law journals such as Cornell Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Journal of International Law, and sought as a presenter at various forums, including the Columbia Tax Policy Colloquium, the Harvard Law School Seminar on Tax Law, Policy, and Practice, and the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium.