Taxation and Big Brother: information, personalisation and privacy in 21st century tax policy

I view part of my responsibility as to report on fiscal developments in the United States. Any report from the States would have to note that the past several weeks have been tumultuous, what with the nomination and hearings regarding a new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and the devastating Hurricane Katrina. On the fiscal front, we are awaiting the report of the President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform, which is expected to outline one or more income tax reform options and at least one consumption tax alternative as a replacement for the income tax. I will try here to touch on all of these developments. I shall begin with the nomination of John Roberts to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. You may be interested to know that Roberts wrote his undergraduate thesis at Harvard about British politics, about the fate, a century ago, of the British Liberal Party which, after winning a landslide victory in 1906, never won another general election. His thesis was that politicians, and judges for that matter, should be wary of the assumption that the future will be little more than an extension of things as they are today.