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- Title
FISCAL GEOGRAPHY.
- Authors
Juan, Eric A. San
- Abstract
While the newly published Opportunity Atlas maps the effect of hometown on children's life chances. this Article describes geographically sensitive tax provisions in a historical context. Under the recent Federal tax reform, the Opportunity Zone shadows predecessors like the Recovery Zone, GO Zone, Liberty Zone, and Empowerment Zone. While relief from unemployment and poverty attracts legislators' sympathy, underlying these provisions is the ideology of the enterprise zone, or the paradox of the governmentally created free market. This Article analyzes that ideal concept by tracing the history of taxation in barter as well as market economies. Wherever governments have collected tax on a national scale, the fiscal result has been geographic and ultimately economic redistribution. Then the question is whether that redistribution advances horizontal or vertical equity. The legal - enforceability of socio-economic rights has become the philosophical afterthought. Classically, the rule of law was posed as freedom from government intervention, but the enterprise zone exemplifies freedom as a legislative artifact. In this context, the incentive effect of the tax zone legislation depends on the economic behavior of the taxpayer. The empirical studies on enterprise zones document modest take-up by the intended taxpayers, whose choices may reflect cultural psychology as much as calculated rationality. There may be neither free market nor rational actor in the enterprise zone. As a creation of tax law, the zone is monitored by the tax collector, who falls into the odd role of facilitator for the incentive provision. Governed by her own behavioral praxis, the revenue agent becomes a functionary on a larger economic stage. In particular, the desuetude of the American inner city and Rust Belt reflect the fiscal geography of Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions past and present. It may take an intervention more heroic than focused tax incentives to revive a "blighted" market.
- Subjects
UNITED States; TAX reform; HISTORY of taxation; UNITED States tax laws; FREE enterprise; ENTERPRISE zones; AGRICULTURAL history; INDUSTRIAL revolution; TAX collection; HISTORY
- Publication
University of Florida Journal of Law & Public Policy, 2021, Vol 31, Issue 3, p377
- ISSN
1047-8035
- Publication type
Article