Volume 14, Issue 1 (Fall 2016)

Posted in Issues Archives

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Wage Taxation and Public Health

Bret N. Bogenschdeider

The structure of a tax system is relevant to public health. Wage taxes are the predominant form of taxation in both Europe and the United States. Yet, high rates of wage taxation harm worker health, particularly when wage taxes are part of an overall regressive tax system. The casual mechanisms for the negative effects of wage taxes on public health occcur by (1) pushing marginal workers into absolute poverty by payment of wage taxes; (2) increasing working hours for low-wage workers; (3) increasing levels of economic inequality by relatively higher tax and audit rates of persons with labor income; and (4) reducing financial (and time) investment in chlidren by overburdened workers. Optimal tax policy accordingly requires an evaluation of the cost of wage taxes levied on “health caplital” of workers as well as financial capital. View More

Privacy and Surveillance: Public Attitudes on Cameras on the Street, in the Home, and in the Workplace

Milton Heumann, Lance Cassak, Esther Kang & Thomas Twichell

There is no dearth of writing about the perils of the erosion of privacy rights in the twenty-first century. The “Snowden Saga” dramatically illustrates and documents the seemingly unlimited ways in which private matters can be revealed to and interpreted by the public. The emergence of cell phone photography and recordings constitutes a sea change in the documentation of an endless list of public and private matters. View More

Improving U.S. Financial Regulation Through OIRA Review & Robust Regulatory Analysis

Robert W. Greene 

By eliminating the Office of Thrift Supervision and reclassifying the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s legal status, the Dodd-Frank Act left the United States financial regulatory system almost entirely in the hands of “independent regulatory agencies.” Unlike executive agencies – such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), or Department of Transportation (DOT) – “independent” agencies, and thus most federal financial regulators, are subject to neither Executive Orders 12,866 and 13,563 nor to Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-4, which together establish a number of regulatory best practices, including the review of proposed regulatory actions by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), housed within OMB. View More

Discovering Flaws: An Analysis of the Amended Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37(E) and Its Impact on the Spoliation of Electronically Stored Evidence

Clare Kealey

The legal community has not been immune to developments brought about by modern technology, nor to the intricate issues that have arisen in its wake. Lawyers, George Paul and Jason Baron eloquently opined that: “[L]awyers must understand that information, as a cultural and technological edifice, has profoundly and irrevocably changed.” Over ninety-percent of all corporate information is electronic, with North American businesses exchanging over 2.5 trillion e-mails per year. Less than one-percent of all communications will ever appear in paper form. Though the heightened acceptance and adoption of e-discovery techniques has spawned great advantages to the discovery process, such embracement is not without its problems. For example, the costs associated with the preservation of electronically stored information (ESI) and ediscovery continue to rise; some projections estimate discovery costs as being between fifty and ninety percent of the total litigation costs in a given case. View More