Friday, March 11, 2016

VICTOR FLEISCHER: OPPONENT OF ‘CARRIED INTEREST’

“The person most responsible for inspiring the movement against the carried-interest tax loophole is Victor Fleischer, a tax-law professor at the University of San Diego School of Law. Fleischer, the son of two college professors in Buffalo, became aware of the loophole in the late nineteen-nineties, when he was working as a tax attorney at Davis Polk, in New York. Fleischer does not consider himself particularly liberal. He is motivated, he told me, by a basic idea. ‘It’s important to think about how the tax system treats people. The tax system has to fund the government and the government has to do things for everyone.’
“For more than a decade, Fleischer has argued that the loophole contributes significantly to income inequality, by inflating what he calls the ‘alpha income’ of financiers in the top one per cent of the one per cent. In legislative circles, he is among the foremost authorities on the issue.


Alec MacGillis, “The Billionaires’ Loophole,” New Yorker, March 14, 2016, pp: 64-73.