Author ORCID Identifier

0009-0003-4214-9540

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2021

Keywords

Tax subsidies, Business tax credit, COVID-19, Lower-income workers, Paid sick leave, Families First Coronavirus Response Act

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is currently ravaging the world, and the United States has been largely unsuccessful at containing the coronavirus. One long-standing policy failure stands out as having exacerbated the pandemic in our country: the lack of a national mandate of paid sick leaves, without which workers face financial and workplace-cultural pressures to attend work while sick, thus spreading the virus to their fellow employees and the public at large.

This Article provides the blueprint for a national, subsidized mandate of paid sick leaves and two additional insights about our tax institutions as mechanisms of effectuating broader societal goals. It first justifies a paidsick- leave mandate on the grounds of market failures (both cognitive biases and externalities) and workplace equality. It also argues for the need of subsidies in order to protect lower-income workers from unemployment risks imposed by a national mandate. Second, the Article critically assesses the current federal legislative approach utilized in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA). Third, the Article proposes designing a national employer mandate of paid sick leaves funded by general-revenue business tax credits and providing partial wage replacement.

This Article’s discussion of paid sick leaves yields two insights about our tax institutions. It questions the role of payroll taxes, which are highly regressive, impose burdens almost exclusively on labor, and are normatively unjustified when the spending funded by payroll taxes benefits the broader non-wage-earning public. The Article also reveals the malleability of tax institutions with respect to funding, administrability, and costs. These comparative advantages of tax institutions make them perennially popular in times of crisis.

First Page

383

Publication Title

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

Comments

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CCBY-4.0).

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