Tyler Cowen, Columnist

Your Tax Return Is None of My Business

Should everybody (not just Trump) be required to file in public? Sure, if you want to widen inequality and nuke privacy.

April 15, 2019 at 2:30 PM UTC

By Tyler Cowen

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of economics at George Mason University and host of the Marginal Revolution blog.

For my eyes only.
Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

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The debate over whether President Donald Trump’s tax returns should be released has raised the question whether all tax returns should be publicly available. This idea has been suggested recently by Binyamin Appelbaum of The New York Times and also Matt Yglesias of Vox. In Norway it has been policy since 1814 and Finland does something similar.

I’m afraid, though, that universal tax transparency would boost U.S. economic inequality, take away second chances and devastate privacy.