Tax Lawyer's Blog

While President Franklin D. Roosevelt was new dealin’ the American people back to the Stone Age he was claiming that he was exempt from all new tax increases he signed into law.

Eugene Volokh writes in Barack Obama as FDR – Are Presidents Constitutionally Exempt from Tax Increases they Sign?

A fascinating post from Prof. Sarah B. Lawsky, on TaxProf.

I hadn’t known that FDR “paid taxes at the rates in effect when he took office, even as statutory tax rates increased,” on the theory that applying the higher taxes “violated the Constitutional provision that states that the president’s compensation ‘shall be neither increased nor diminished during the period for which he shall have been elected.’” (The post includes a copy of FDR’s claim form on the subject.)

Interesting enough, but don’t count on President Obama trying it:

That was apparently a legally sensible position at the time, but apparently not now, given some intervening precedents on federal judges’ salaries, which are governed by a similar provision, minus the prohibition on salary increases. Plus, as Prof. Lawsky suggests, such a claim would be pretty bad politics today, when presidents routinely release their tax returns.

Ya think?

If Obama tried something like this it would be a suicide of Jim Jonesian proportions.

Here’s FDR’s claim for special tax treatment:

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