The Military Draft and Tax Policy

Michael Sabin (Simpson Thacher, New York) has posted Conscription Tax on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

Public debate about military draft is back in headlines. ... Besides analysis of the social and political consequences of each technique of military manpower procurement and relative performance of conscripted recruits and volunteers, any draft reform requires also a careful inquiry into its fiscal applications: how will the draft affect the labor supply? Is "conscription tax" (and each one of the draft models: lottery, general draft, with or without exemptions), given the current tax system, fair? What are the intergenerational consequences?

An analysis of conscription through the glasses of tax policy is an important and somewhat a novel idea: public finance and political science scholars never made a systematic evaluation of the draft using this methodology. Besides widely discussed efficiencies of the volunteer-based versus drafted military, tax analysis of the draft raises several issues mentioned only briefly in the literature, like relative costs of enforcing and administrating "conscription tax" and conventional tax compliance (and variables affecting them, like perceived inequity of different modes of conscription) and transitional issues.