A Short & Happy Guide to Tax Policy: What Is Taxed

We spend a fair amount of time in law school talking about the taxation of income. What about taxing other things, like spending, wealth, luxury and sin? What about funding government in other ways, like borrowing money, printing money, building toll bridges, and selling lottery tickets?

This Short and Happy Guide considers all of these possibilities. Would taxing spending (sales taxes, value added taxes, or annual consumption taxes) be better than taxing income or wealth? Perhaps we should tax all of them. In fact, we do. This book considers each of these ways of funding government—how they work, and what makes them good or bad.