Racial tax data would foreclose lawmakers’ claims of ignorance

Evidence

Obtaining this information would counter the fallacy that our tax system affects everyone equally, regardless of race, or that only white Americans pay taxes. That data could then be brought before Congress when new rates and preferential loopholes are introduced as part of reforms. It’s also a critical part of the case for a reparations-based tax credit; legal precedent (which we’ll discuss later on in this chapter) requires proof of both discriminatory effect and intent to award any kind of race-based compensation. We may not have that data for the past, but if we begin collecting it now, it will become harder for lawmakers to claim ignorance of how the same tax policies have different racial impacts in the future. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 520

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the legal doctrine (discriminatory effect plus intent) that she flags for later in the chapter — and to broader anti-subordination legal scholarship.

Related

• Race-aware tax policy can close the wealth gap while restoring the system’s original intent (similarity 0.85)
• Racial data publication, flat progressivity, and reparations credit would close the gap (similarity 0.84)
• The IRS not publishing tax data by race forecloses race-based tax remedies. (similarity 0.81)
• The IRS collected racial data until 2002 but never matched it (similarity 0.81)
• Race data on taxpayers can be inferred by matching returns with census zip-code demographics (similarity 0.81)
• The IRS does not collect or publish tax statistics by race (similarity 0.80)
• IRS tax statistics are not published by race so proxies are needed (similarity 0.80)
• Tax agencies could collect racial data but uniformly choose not to (similarity 0.80)
• Racial tax disparity comes from ignoring race, not from race-based provisions. (similarity 0.79)
• Imputed racial tax data beats the complete absence of it (similarity 0.78)