Understanding the Nuttiness of State Tax Policy: When States Have Both Too Much Sovereignty and Not Enough

Charles E. McLure

National Tax Journal, 2005, vol. 58, issue 3, 565-73

Abstract: Much of this nuttiness, the part related to lack of uniformity and consistency across states, the legal inability to implement policies that would make good sense, and the part that involves state beggar–thy–neighbor tax policies, such as sales–only apportionment and the failure to require combination of unitary businesses, is rooted in our system of government. As my title says, the individual states have both too much sovereignty over tax policy and not enough. I will use the lack of coordination of corporate income taxes and of sales and use taxes to illustrate the problem. For this purpose I will use the term "coordination" to refer to uniformity of tax bases and administrative procedures and cooperation in administration, but not to harmonization of tax rates, which should be under state control and not necessarily uniform.

Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.17310/ntj.2005.3.16 (application/pdf)
https://doi.org/10.17310/ntj.2005.3.16 (text/html)
Access is restricted to subscribers and members of the National Tax Association.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ntj:journl:v:58:y:2005:i:3:p:565-73

Access Statistics for this article

National Tax Journal is currently edited by Stacy Dickert-Conlin and William M. Gentry

More articles in National Tax Journal from National Tax Association, National Tax Journal Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The University of Chicago Press ().