Recent years have seen expanded interest in new or less common forms of taxation—things like wealth taxes, digital advertising taxes, excess compensation taxes, and financial transaction taxes. States have little or no experience with these taxes, leaving basic questions about the proper structure of such taxes unresolved and creating significant uncertainty around fundamental issues such as their revenue potential, impact on tax competitiveness, and even, in some cases, constitutionality.
In this session, we will dive into several of these notable additions to the tax debate, outlining the arguments made for and against each tax, exploring some of the design and implementation challenges policymakers have encountered or are likely to encounter, and surveying the legal hurdles such tax proposals would have to clear.
Areas of Focus
- Wealth taxes and the mark-to-market taxation of capital gains income
- Financial transaction and stock transfer taxes
- Digital advertising and data taxes, contrasted with sales taxation of digital goods and services
- Excess compensation taxes, business head taxes, and other new developments in state taxation
Session Resources
- Washington State Floats a Wealth Tax Which Relies Almost Exclusively on Four People
- New York’s “Billionaire Mark to Market Tax Act”
- The Drawbacks of State Taxes on Financial Transactions
- Worse Than Advertised: The Legal and Economic Pitfalls of Maryland’s Digital Advertising Tax
- Maryland’s Digital Advertising Tax Is Unworkably Vague
- Business Head Taxes Take Aim at Having “Too Many Good Jobs”