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Although all countries must tax their citizenry, wide variation exists in how this taxation is conducted. Countries have a wide variety of different types of taxes—such as income taxes, consumption taxes, and property taxes—and can create all sorts of exemptions and deduction and rebates that benefit specific activities or industries. Adding additional types of taxes or additional tax exemptions adds complexity to the tax code, and this chapter demonstrates that when a country has more access points, they are more likely to add this complexity as narrow groups push for specific measures that benefit only them.

This chapter explores issues concerning the relationship between the government and Christian nonprofits. These issues include how the government treats Christian nonprofits within the tax code, government funding of Christian nonprofits, and Christian nonprofit lobbying of the government on social and political issues.

This chapter focuses on different groups of people who play a role in tax politics. One of the most important underlying dynamics of tax politics is the variety in levels of intensity that different groups bring to the issue. Income tax, in particular, has become the conduit through which nearly all federal social and economic policies are attempted, be it by libertarian Republicans or by liberal Democrats. The chapter discusses the high-intensity people in tax politics, who are either the special pleaders or the would-be populists. The special pleaders are mostly corporations and industry groups. The would-be populists, more central to the debates of fundamental reform, have grown adept at channeling the low-intensity resentment of the public at having to pay taxes into high-intensity legislative campaigns that seek to reshape not only the tax code but the place of government in American life.

This chapter discusses how the US tax code—like many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country tax codes—favors capital over labor, and thereby is at odds with fundamental tenets of human rights and policy principles regarding equity. This bias in favor of capital may not only be counterproductive in terms of its impacts on revenue generation and tax administration. It also entrenches inequalities and disregards the ways in which the human body, with its labor capacity, is the most essential “asset” on which most people rely. Therefore, labor should enjoy the preferences, such as the realization principle and depreciation, from which capital currently benefits. The chapter then outlines a course of investigation for further study including contrasting Social Security old-age pension and disability benefits, and exploring the consequences of shifting property to accrual accounting while providing the human body with generous depreciation deductions and tax deferral through realization.

This chapter considers philanthropy in the context of the public sphere and discusses the procedural guidelines, rules and regulations bearing on the administration of philanthropic assets in the U.S. It highlights the lack of government oversight on what kinds of causes are to be supported and explains that rationale for the permissive policy position of the government. This chapter suggests that tax code's inclination to support giving is that government sees private philanthropy as a necessary partner in the pursuit of public purposes. It also considers the parallels between giving the political speech and argues that while American philanthropy is shaped by government through regulation and the application of subsidies, donors are still in a position to set the terms of their relationship with government.

In 1954, the nation’s tax code was reorganized and renamed, becoming the Internal Revenue Code of 1954. Three decades later, the Tax Reform Act of 1986 was so fundamental that US tax law was again renamed by Congress to be the Internal Revenue Code of 1986. Another three decades have now passed since the United States undertook a significant reform of its tax system. The United States and world economies have changed substantially during these years, with increasing globalization and tax competition, greater environmental awareness, a growth in tax-preferred retirement accounts, increases in inequality and the college wage premium, an explosion of spending through the tax system (tax expenditures), a growing importance of non-corporate business, and a rise in government debt. This introduction reviews these developments, the volume’s contributions that address them, and the implications for future tax reform.

To further the goal of increasing homeownership, federal housing policy makes extensive use of credit and tax incentives. These activities involve substantial federal cost and risk. This chapter reviews these risks and estimates the value of indirect and off-budget activities supporting homeownership. The analysis emphasizes the Federal Housing Administration's (FHA) mortgage insurance programs, and revisits their rationale and future role in light of the rapid rise and subsequent fall of the subprime market. Federal housing policy is executed through a complex array of institutions and programs, including the tax code, the FHA, and the Veterans Administration (VA). A comprehensive look at these programs reveals that off-budget policies primarily provide subsidies for middle- and upper-income homeowners and home purchasers, whereas programs subject to Congressional budget appropriations are directed toward lower-income and rental households.

It would take a great many different concepts—or quantities—to capture all of our notions of what is meant by complexity (or its opposite, simplicity). However, the notion that corresponds most closely to what we mean by complexity in ordinary conversation and in most scientific discourse is "effective complexity." In nontechnical language, we can define the effective complexity (EC) of an entity as the length of a highly compressed description of its regularities [6, 7, 8]. For a more technical definition, we need a formal approach both to the notion of minimum description length and to the distinction between regularities and those features that are treated as random or incidental. We can illustrate with a number of examples how EC corresponds to our intuitive notion of complexity. We may call a novel complex if it has a great many different characters, scenes, subplots, and so on, so that the regularities of the novel require a long description. The United States tax code is complex, since it is very long and each rule in it is a regularity. Neckties may be simple, like those with regimental stripes, or complex, like some of those designed by Jerry Garcia. From time to time, an author presents a supposedly new measure of complexity (such as the "self-dissimilarity" of Wolpert and Macready [17]) without recognizing that when carefully defined it is just a special case of effective complexity. Like some other concepts sometimes identified with complexity, the EC of an entity is context-dependent, even subjective to a considerable extent. It depends on the coarse graining (level of detail) at which the entity is described, the language used to describe it, the previous knowledge and understanding that are assumed, and, of course, the nature of the distinction made between regularity and randomness. Like other proposed "measures of complexity," EC is most useful when comparing two entities, at least one of which has a large value of the quantity in question.

On December 24, 1989, a man named Charles Taylor marshaled a band of armed rebels in the northern part of Liberia, a small country on the coast of West Africa. Carpeted in green jungle crossed by the occasional red dirt road connecting remote ramshackle towns, Liberia had never managed to attract much attention from the outside world. It carried none of the economic clout or strategic importance of continental powers like Kenya and South Africa. To outsiders, Liberia figured as little more than a historical curiosity, the place where freed American slaves settled and founded Africa’s first independent republic in 1847. Nor did Charles Taylor’s activities attract much notice. Military coups are a common occurrence throughout Africa, as much a part of reality as the tropical downpours that bring life to a temporary standstill in thousands of villages across the landscape before people tentatively poke out their heads and resume their daily activities. But this time something was different. Instead of racing to the capital and storming the presidential palace—as the incumbent dictator, Samuel Doe, had done a decade earlier—Taylor and his men were slow and deliberate in their progress, taking control of one town after the next. Rumors spread that the rebels were supported by Libya, a country that exercises much greater influence throughout the African continent than most people realize. Ultimately Charles Taylor would orchestrate a catastrophic civil war in Liberia, a conflict that would engulf neighboring Sierra Leone and lead to one of the worst humanitarian crises of the past century. At the time I was serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia, where my wife and I were assigned to work in President Doe’s hometown of Zwedru, a remote place that could only be reached through days of travel along roads with mud pits the size of swimming pools or, alternatively, in a single-propeller plane that the tropical air currents would toss about like a toy in a bathtub. It was in Liberia that I first came to appreciate how national governance impacts the lives of billions of people every day.