Tackling tax policy

Sheldon Pollack practiced tax and business law for eight years in Philadelphia, but his heart wasn't in it.

"I was much more interested in teaching and writing about tax policy from the perspective of a political scientist than in actually practicing tax law, which I found entirely boring," he says.

Pollack had been a lecturer in the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania before attending law school there and had done his undergraduate and doctoral work in political science and government. And, while earning a doctorate from the Department of Government at Cornell University in 1979, he taught political theory and American government. So, he says, the transition from practicing attorney to professor of business law was not that difficult, and he wasted no time in doing it.

Pollack joined the Department of Accounting and Management Information Systems in UD's Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics as an assistant professor in 1994. He became a full professor last May, in less than nine years--not an easy task in academia.

His teaching and research focus on federal tax policy, and he published his first book, The Failure of U.S. Tax Policy: Revenue and Politics, in 1996. He published the second, Refinancing America: The Republican Anti-Tax Agenda, this year. Both books are sharply critical of U.S. tax policy.

Pollack is working on a third book on how the U.S. Supreme Court interprets the Constitution, and he continues to write about tax policy for various professional journals.

His latest piece, "Constitutional Interpretation From Two Perspectives: Canada and the United States," will appear as a chapter in Constitutionalism in Canada and the United States by Steven L. Newman, scheduled for publication in January by the State University of New York Press. The research in that article is the foundation of Pollack's third book.

During his tenure at UD, Pollack has become known in the regional media as an expert on federal tax policy and frequently is interviewed by local radio, TV and newspapers to give advice and information during income tax season. He is in demand as a speaker and lecturer and has addressed the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. He also has testified as an expert witness before the U.S. Senate Finance Committee. This fall, he was invited to give the inaugural guest lecture to Temple University Law School's new Tax Law Society.

Pollack holds joint appointments at UD in the Department of Political Science and International Relations and the Legal Studies Program and is on the Legal Studies Program executive board.

In The Failure of U.S. Tax Policy: Revenue and Politics, published by Pennsylvania State University Press, Pollack examines how the present tax system got to be what he describes as the "out-of-control," overly complex, tangled mess it is today. He details the explosion of tax legislation from Congress in the 1980s, which first lowered tax rates and gave big breaks to special interests, he says, and then raised them when the deficit soared and the political climate changed. In the book, Pollack also identifies the roles that President Bill Clinton and Sen. Bob Dole played in formulating tax policy during the two stormy years after the 1994 elections, which gave the Republican Party control of Congress.

In Refinancing America: The Republican Anti-Tax Agenda, Pollack traces the roots of Republican anti-tax sentiment from the Civil War, when an income tax was levied to fund the war, through the 20th century. He says that the Republicans who gained control of Congress in the mid-1990s had on their agenda nothing short of an American fiscal revolution.

"They envisioned a complete refinancing of the American state," Pollack writes, one that would leave the affluent with a significantly greater share of their wealth and the federal government with significantly less revenue. The unspoken goal of the latter, he says, was "to end the modern social welfare state."

The book recounts the long history of hostility to the taxation of wealth and income within the conservative wing of the Republican Party and considers the origins of that anti-tax sentiment.

Pollack also has written more than 40 articles on tax policy for journals, newspapers and other publications.

As a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1995 and the Urban Institute in the summer of 2000, he researched federal tax policy and congressional policymaking. In the spring of 2000, he was a guest lecturer in the Department of Legal Studies at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

--Barbara Garrison