Fictions of Income Tax

Abstract

Income tax law generally taxes the results of legal transactions rather than their underlying economic effect. The courts often tell us that tax law does not tax on the basis of economic equivalence. But the problem is deeper. In order to make income tax work at all, the law must make a number of assumptions that are not in fact correct, assumptions as to both the factual and the legal nature of the taxpayer’s income. The effect of these assumptions is that the base that the law taxes becomes removed from the facts of the case.