Glogower, Gamage & Richards: Why A Federal Wealth Tax Is Constitutional

Ari Glogower (Ohio State; Google Scholar), David Gamage (Indiana; Google Scholar) & Kitty Richards (Roosevelt Institute), Why a Federal Wealth Tax is Constitutional:

A federal wealth tax can help level the playing field of our unequal society and promote shared economic prosperity. When wealth taxes have been proposed in national campaigns of recent years, they generated strong public support and broadened the conversation over the future of progressive tax policies. However, critics of wealth taxation argue that a wealth tax could be struck down by the Supreme Court because of constitutional provisions that delineate Congress’s power to tax. Namely, critics undermine federal wealth tax proposals by relying on the “apportionment rule,” which requires certain taxes to be apportioned among the states according to their populations.

Ari Glogower, David Gamage, and Kitty Richards contend that the apportionment rule, a vestigial relic of the founders’ compromise on slavery, does not interfere with Congress’s ability to legislate a tax on an individual’s net wealth.

The authors describe the main constitutional provisions that give Congress its broad taxing authority, situate those provisions in the constitutional structure and historical context, and analyze Supreme Court precedent to demonstrate that an unapportioned wealth tax is constitutional.

• David Gamage (Indiana), Five Key Research Findings on Wealth Taxation for the Super Rich
• David Gamage (Indiana), On The Why And How Of Wealth Tax And Accrual Income Tax Reforms
• David Gamage (Indiana), The Political-Instability Benefits of Deferral and the Case for Wealth Tax or Mark-to-Market Style Tax Reform
• Ari Glogower (Ohio State), A Constitutional Wealth Tax, 118 Mich. L. Rev. 717 (2020) (reviewed by Hayes Holderness (Richmond) here)