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Taxation & Estate Planning

Start Making Sense

Unfair but balanced commentary on tax and budget policy, contemporary U.S. politics and culture.

Post Frequency: 6.6/day

Last Entry: May 13, 2013 at 16:01:00

Upcoming trip

Posted on May 13, 2013
Torn ACL or not, the show must go on. (And anyway I have been cleared to walk and travel.)So on Sunday night I will be flying to Stockholm, Sweden, in order to spend a week there, during which I will guest-lecture at two Stockholm University Law School classes on international taxation, as well as giving a talk based on my Henry Simons paper to Stockholm University faculty...

Advance birthday present!

Posted on May 10, 2013
Tomorrow is my birthday - I won't say what number, though it is a matter of public record. But today I got a delightful birthday present, a day in advance. And yes, my saying so is just snark.Ten days ago I experienced an unpleasant knee injury while playing tennis...

Tax policy colloquium, week 14: Raj Chetty's "Active vs. Passive Decisions and Crowd-Out in Retirement Savings Accounts: Evidence from Denmark"

Posted on May 08, 2013
Earlier this week we completed the 18th (!) annual edition of the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium. Thanks to my colleague for the semester, Bill Gale, for being great to work with both in general and with our constituencies, the students and the PM attendees...

Department of stupid ideas, part 3,267,889,145

Posted on May 06, 2013
The debt ceiling will be expiring again soon, and reportedly Congressional Republicans are once again considering how best they could try to extract compensation for allowing it to increase. The latest idea, apparently, is to require fundamental tax reform as the price for raising the debt ceiling...

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Tax policy colloquium, week 13: Itai Grinberg's "Emerging Countries and the Taxation of Offshore Accounts"

Posted on May 02, 2013
On Tuesday, we had our penultimate session of the year, featuring Itai Grinberg's follow-up to his UCLA Law Review piece, The Battle Over Taxing Offshore Accounts. In "Battle," Grinberg discusses the global response to "offshoring" (a truly U.S...

Alan Viard's "PPL: Exposing the Flaws of the Foreign Tax Credit"

Posted on April 29, 2013
About a month ago, I commented here on PPL, the U.S. Supreme Court's pending foreign tax credit case that raises the question of whether a retroactive UK tax, meant to claw back the benefits that investors derived when government-owned utilities were privatized at what turned out to be too low a price, should trigger foreign tax credits for U...

Tax policy colloquium, week 12: Larry Bartels' "The Class War Gets Personal: Inequality as a Political Issue in the 2012 Election"

Posted on April 25, 2013
This week, Larry Bartels presented the above paper, which relates to tax policy in the sense that it examines public views about tax progressivity, in the context of the 2012 presidential election.Extra bonus fun: among the paper's data points was the impact of the Obama campaign's immortal "America the Beautiful" campaign ad, which depicted Romney crooning tunelessly while the words on the screen cited him for shipping jobs to Mexico and China, outsourcing other jobs to India, placing millions in a Swiss bank account, and investing in tax havens like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands...

TV appearance tonight, and the "iron box" in international tax policy

Posted on April 24, 2013
Tonight at 8:30, I'm on Al Jazeera English (Inside Story, Americas), for a 20-minute panel discussion of corporate tax avoidance. (Mainly legal avoidance, but also with reference to illegal evasion, such as by individuals who use fake companies...

Senate vote on the "Marketplace Fairness Act"

Posted on April 22, 2013
Today the Senate voted by 74 to 20 to allow the Marketplace Fairness Act to come to the Senate floor for an up-or-down vote. This is a bill that would extend states' power to require large, technically out-of-state businesses to collect and remit sales tax on Internet sales to state residents...

Is empirical analysis really needed to debunk a foolish claim?

Posted on April 18, 2013
I am of course just an observer, not an active participant, in the debate concerning the Reinhart-Rogoff paper claiming that evil magic starts happening, in an oddly discontinuous fashion, when the debt-to-GDP ratio hits 90 percent. It's dispiriting to read how sloppy and apparently unprofessional the paper was, and to think that it may have substantially worsened public policy outcomes around the world (although, more likely, it merely served to rationalize misguided austerity that would have been pursued anyway)...

Tax policy colloquium, week 11 - Sarah Lawsky's "Modeling Uncertainty in Tax Law"

Posted on April 17, 2013
Yesterday we discussed the above paper, which appeared in the Stanford Law Review recently. (We don't entirely insist on current works in progress, so long as a paper and topic are fresh for our audience and the author to discuss.) It concerns uncertainty aversion, aka ambiguity aversion, as distinct from risk aversion...

Usefulness of simplifying models (re-posted due to a technical problem)

Posted on April 17, 2013
Tomorrow at the colloquium, we will be discussing Sarah Lawsky's paper, "Modeling Uncertainty in Tax Law." More on this in due course. But as the paper discusses, among other topics, the question of what makes a model useful - in particular, the tradeoff between being complete on the one hand and usable on the other - I was reminded of a favorite quote, from Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno Concluded:?That?s another thing we?ve learned from your Nation,? said Mein Herr, ?map-making...

Tax day

Posted on April 15, 2013
I use Turbo Tax, despite Intuit's reprehensible lobbying against tax simplification via the option to use "pre-populated tax returns" generated by the federal and state authorities. I gave up on preparing my tax return by hand more than 10 years ago...

Usefulness of simplifying models

Posted on April 15, 2013
Tomorrow at the colloquium, we will be discussing Sarah Lawsky's paper, "Modeling Uncertainty in Tax Law." More on this in due course. But as the paper discusses, among other topics, the question of what makes a model useful - in particular, the tradeoff between being complete on the one hand and usable on the other - I was reminded of a favorite quote, from Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno Concluded:?That?s another thing we?ve learned from your Nation,? said Mein Herr, ?map-making...

Wire, "Change Becomes Us"

Posted on April 13, 2013
Wire is a cerebral art-rock-punk band that arose in England in the late 1970s and put out three great albums of constantly changing, usually high-tempo yet melodic, reflective, and off-kilter albums (Pink Flag, Chairs Missing, 154). They then spent the next few decades periodically disappearing and reinventing themselves, including in a very 1980s electronica phase that I never quite got into (although perhaps it deserves a shot)...

Internalities versus externalities, and the specter of paternalism

Posted on April 11, 2013
One last thought about the topic of Brian Galle's colloquium paper earlier this week. The paper notes that there is a lot of overlap between "internality" and "externality" explanations for policy interventions such as inducing retirement saving through Social Security and employee pension rules, or addressing obesity through taxes on junk food or a "Big Gulp" ban...

Tax policy colloquium, week 10: Brian Galle's ?Regulation from the Inside Out: Nudges and Price Instrument Theory for Internalties and Externalities"

Posted on April 10, 2013
Yesterday at the colloquium, Brian Galle presented the above-titled paper, available (in early draft form) here. The following is an expanded version of more cryptic notes that I had prepared for myself to help organize the discussion at the session...

Forthcoming short "jot"

Posted on April 08, 2013
There is an interesting new website called Jotwell, which stands for the "Journal of Things We Like (Lots)." The basic idea is to recruit a bunch of editors in a given legal field, such as tax, each of whom agrees to submit a short piece (500 to 1,000 words) once a year discussing a recent publication - two years old or less - that he or she particularly likes...

The pension "default" issue, and income vs. consumption taxation

Posted on April 03, 2013
A discussion at NYU Law School of a draft paper by colleagues on behavioral economics, plus the fact that Brian Galle's paper at the colloquium next week will be on the topic of "nudges," pushed me to an I hope moderately interesting thought about retirement policy through the tax code that I thought I would mention here...

Tax policy colloquium, week 9: Alan Viard's "Progressive Consumption Taxation: The Choice of Tax Design"

Posted on April 03, 2013
Yesterday at the colloquium, we discussed Alan Viard's above-titled draft paper, which is a follow-up to his excellent book (co-authored with Robert Carroll), Progressive Consumption Taxation: The X-Tax Revisited. But whereas the book focused in depth on how one should design an X-tax, if it were used to supplant the existintg income tax, the article is a comparative assessment of the X-tax versus the other main instrument for progressive consumption taxation, a personal expenditure tax or PET...

The math appears to check out

Posted on March 30, 2013
Four or five months ago, I could hold two kittens in one hand. Now I pretty much need two hands to hold one kitten (or else he'll dangle and struggle). But their weight has indeed quadrupled since we got them. (This photo is about two months old...

Supreme Court foreign tax credit case

Posted on March 28, 2013
As long as I am writing blog entries that mention Supreme Court litigation, perhaps I ought to mention the pending case of PPL Corporation v. Commissioner, which concerns foreign tax credits, and thus seemingly is right up my alley. But there is also a reason why I hadn't addressed it previously...

One last Fiona Apple (and John Lennon) comment

Posted on March 28, 2013
One last Fiona Apple comment here before I move onto other musical interests (whether or not I end up blogging about them). I earlier offered Carole King as my 1960s-era comp for her, and that seemed logical enough at the time, but now I think that in some ways a better comp is John Lennon's classic 1970 Plastic Ono Band album...

The problem with DOMA is discrimination, not states' rights

Posted on March 28, 2013
Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but Justice Kennedy's apparent view, in yesterday's oral argument about DOMA, that it might be unconstitutional based on states' rights, strikes me as really weak (and I am restraining my impulse to offer a more vitriolic description)...

Tax policy colloquium, week 8: Leslie Robinson's "Internal Ownership Structures of Multinational Firms"

Posted on March 27, 2013
On Tuesday, Leslie Robinson of the Tuck Business School at Dartmouth presented the above-titled paper, co-authored with her colleague Katharina Lewellen, and available here.This continued our annual tradition of having a paper by an accounting professor (we also try to do one each year by a political scientist, this year to be Larry Bartels on April 23), along with some economists, a mix of junior and senior law professors, and often a tax practitioner...

Free at last (!?!?!?!?!)

Posted on March 15, 2013
I have just completed what might be a full draft of my book-in-progress, Fixing The U.S. International Tax Rules. It took 4 years and 4 fresh starts - whereas usually, once I have a book clearly in mind, I can write it in a few months...

Tax policy colloquium, week 7: Desai and Dharmapala's "Competitive Neutrality Among Debt-Financed Multinational Firms

Posted on March 14, 2013
On Tuesday we did our last Tax Policy Colloquium before NYU's one-week spring break. Our speaker was Dhammika Dharmapala, presenting a draft of the above-titled work that he and Mihir Desai are co-authoring. No link here, as he asked us to take it down afterwards because it is still in very preliminary form...

Corporate tax reform?

Posted on March 10, 2013
In an earlier post I expressed both political and substantive skepticism about the current prospects and merits of 1986-style individual income tax reform, which would feature lowering the rates in exchange for broadening the base. But there has also been much talk about doing this just in the corporate income tax...

Gary is a basketball fan

Posted on March 07, 2013
He appears to be quite interested in the Knicks-Thunder game.

Skepticism about "fundamental tax reform"

Posted on March 06, 2013
Today we had a special lunchtime event at NYU Law School. Victor Thuronyi of the International Monetary Fund, an old friend with whom I worked on the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (he was on the Treasury staff, while I was at the Joint Committee on Taxation), discussed his plan for enacting a "supplemental expenditure tax" (SET) as part of an overall tax reform plan...

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