In 2016, a consortium of journalists exposed how a global elite including associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the King of Saudi Arabia, drug dealers, and others hid their wealth (legally and illegally) using a network of shell companies and offshore tax havens. Known as the “Panama Papers” investigation, their project revealed how the wealthy and powerful use shell companies…Read More

State capacity is in vogue. For decades, scholars theorized and debated the concept in academic obscurity; now, talk of state capacity saturates popular policy and political discourse. And whereas the scholarship focused on states’ ability to pursue official goals autonomously from powerful social groups, today’s purported state capacity liberals in the popular press—including Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, and Matthew Yglesias—diagnose…Read More

We at Democracy have tracked recent arguments around wealth taxes, but felt there’s an almost philosophical question underlying these scholarly questions. Is the goal of optimal tax policy to create revenue, to create a fair distribution of wealth across society, to enhance economic growth? And does this debate go beyond economics and funding government and into the health of our democracy…Read More