OMG Transatlantic Tax Talks: Alex Raskolnikov (Columbia University)

Speaker

Alex Raskolnikov

 

Read more about Alex Raskolnikov

Organisers

Michael Devereux (Oxford)
Lilian Faulhaber (Georgetown)
Michelle Hanlon (MIT)
Jim Hines (Michigan)
Wolfgang Schön (Max Planck)
John Vella (Oxford)

What is OMG?

On behalf of the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation, University of Michigan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance, and Georgetown University Law Center, we are excited to announce the OMG Transatlantic Tax Talks. (Why OMG? Oxford-Michigan-MIT-Munich-Georgetown.) 

This speaker series will be taking place on Zoom over the 2021-2022 academic year. It will be an interdisciplinary series, with experts in taxation from law, economics, and accounting presenting their work.

The remaining presenters for 2021-2022 are:

  • May 19 – Alex Raskolnikov (Columbia University)

Alex Raskolnikov, of Columbia University, will be presenting "Should Only the Richest Pay More?" on Thursday 19 May 2022.

All talks will be on Zoom at 12:00 Eastern time/5:00 GMT/6:00 CET. Presenters will speak for about 20 minutes, and the remaining 40 minutes will be used for Q&A. 

Should Only the Richest Pay More?

This paper challenges the leading academic, political, and cultural narrative supporting greater redistribution. This narrative holds that redistribution should come at the expense of the very restricted group of the highest earners: the one percent, the super-rich, the billionaire class. I argue that the very reasons offered in support of this view call for redistribution from a much broader group that includes the affluent—those with incomes in the ninetieth to ninety ninth percentiles of the distribution. Whether one looks at the recent trends in income concentration, wealth concentration, economic mobility, government capture, political polarization, or the rise of populism, the affluent are as great or greater contributors to these problems as those in the top one percent. Remarkably, the contemporary U.S. legal and economic scholarship has ignored the affluent almost completely, greatly limiting the magnitude of possible economic transfers as well the form that these transfers may take. This paper reveals the analytical weakness of the prevailing narrow view. If the richest should pay more taxes, the affluent should as well.