Tax Law, Religion, and Justice: An Exploration of Theological Reflections on Taxation. By Allen Calhoun

Since its inception, Congress has used the income tax to accomplish multiple divergent goals. Raising revenue for an expanding array of state functions has always been one critical goal, but has never been the only one. Among other things, Congress has consistently used the income tax to reduce economic inequality, both through progressive tax rates and through redistributive benefits. While these redistributive goals have always underlain the federal income tax, by the middle of the twentieth century, politicians and tax theorists began to view redistribution ambivalently. Concerns over the efficiency of the tax began to displace equitable concerns. Rather than focus on the ability of the income tax to right economic wrongs, tax theorists began to emphasize designing the income tax to minimize the distortions it caused in taxpayers’ economic decision-making. By the late-twentieth century, a good tax was a tax that did not cause taxpayers to change what they would have done in the absence of a tax.