Taxation & Estate Planning
Start Making Sense 
Unfair but balanced commentary on tax and budget policy, contemporary U.S. politics and culture.
Post Frequency: 1/day Last Entry: November 18, 2009 at 14:10:00 Recent Entries: 360
Go to Start Making Sense, find other Taxation & Estate Planning blogs, or browse all law blogs.
Search
Posts
Sad news
Posted on November 18, 2009Earlier this week, former House of Representatives Legislative Counsel Ward Hussey died. Ward was the chief person responsible for actual drafting of the Internal Revenue Code from at least the early 1950s through the Tax Reform Act of 1986.That sounds like a left-handed compliment at best (then again, I'm left-handed and it's a strong part of my identity)...
Quick, get them a law prof or economist before they embarrass themselves further
Posted on November 09, 2009On the New York City subway today, I saw the following ad:"Freelancers pay twice the Social Security tax that traditional workers do. And yet, we don't feel any more secure. Weird."Followed by a plea to go the website of the Freelancers Union, which is "working to make freelance fair...
Foreign tax credits
Posted on November 05, 2009I'm nearing completion of a short, somewhat preliminary, but I think also provocative and surprising yet correct, article entitled "The Case Against Foreign Tax Credits." Not ready to post it, but the time may come fairly soon.
Waiting for 2012
Posted on November 05, 2009No, that isn't a presidential election reference. I'd predict that Obama is reelected (running against an actual or simulated loon) after tough midterms in 2010, but that's not what I have in mind here. By now the 2009 elections are so earlier-this-week anyway, whereas last night's baseball travesty remains fresh for another few hours...
Available for free - unused paper title
Posted on October 27, 2009"Tagging" is a popular idea in tax policy scholarship these days. The idea goes back to a 1978 paper by 2001 Economics Nobelist George Akerlof, called "The Economics of 'Tagging' as Applied to the Optimal Income Tax, Welfare Programs, and Manpower Planning...
True to life?
Posted on October 26, 2009Two novels I've read this month - Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children and David Lodge's Deaf Sentence - appear to be building towards unpleasant or even horrific climaxes for the lead characters, but then they kind of trail away instead. I half-wanted the worst to happen, though also finding the prospect painful...
All three of them
Posted on October 25, 2009They're getting along better these days, though Seymour and Buddy still stage the occasional squeakfest or batting practice. We are still building the trust level with Seymour (look what 7 years have done for us with the once-shy Ursula). Constant love-bombing gradually breaks down their defenses...
Meanwhile, back at the ranch ...
Posted on October 19, 2009I had almost forgotten that the bizarre witching hour for a one-year disappearance of the federal estate tax is almost at hand. Under current law, the tax will entirely disappear on January 1, 2010, and then return to life at its pre-2001 levels on January 1, 2011...
Ups and downs
Posted on October 18, 2009Today I spoke on a panel at NYU Law School's Family Day, when students' parents, significant others, siblings, etc. come to the school for a series of events. Pretty big crowd for the panel - probably about 500 or so. My topic was the long-term fiscal problems we face, and what the Obama Administration is (or isn't) doing about it...
And another publication
Posted on October 15, 2009I have a short note, "The Obama Administration's tax reform proposals concerning controlled foreign corporations," that just came out in the British Tax Review. The full cite is 4 BTR 331-339 (2009). As it may not be easy to access in the U.S. interested parties can contact me by e-mail for a reprint.
New article in the works
Posted on October 15, 2009Having completed the first 4 (out of 7) chapters of my book-in-progress, "Fixing the U.S. International Tax Rules," I've now decided on a detour that may take me a couple of months. To give one of its relatively novel ideas more prominence, I'm going to write a stand-alone article entitled "The Case Against Foreign Tax Credits...
From financial crisis to debt crisis?
Posted on October 15, 2009Courtesy of Brad DeLong, Ken Rogoff has some sobering words about the next Halloween trick that the world economy may soon be facing.I remember Ken Rogoff from the strangely compelling WNET-TV coverage of the Fischer-Spassky chess championship match in 1972, where he was the briefly immortal Shelby Lyman's # 1 in-house guest analyst (leaving aside the hot-line phone connection to Edmar Mednis and the gang at the Marshall Chess Club)...
Bruce Bartlett's new book
Posted on October 14, 2009If Diogenes went to Washington, he could stop looking once he ran into Bruce Bartlett.Bruce's new book shows that he is not just intellectually honest but persuasive, personally candid and - I hate to use this much-abused word but it's really the apt one here - genuinely patriotic, in that he prefers trying to save the U...
Good luck with that
Posted on October 14, 2009Saudi Arabia wants monetary compensation from consumer countries if they cut their oil purchases in response to global warming.Next up, crack dealers want compensation from former customers who get their lives in order.This is actually a transition issue, akin to those I discuss in my book on the subject...
And another SSRN posting
Posted on October 02, 2009My article from last fall, "The Long-Term U.S. Fiscal Gap: Is the Main Problem Generational Inequity?," has now appeared in print at 77 George Washington University Law Review 1298-1357 (2009). It is part of a symposium volume in the GWU Law Review concerning generational equity...
SSRN posting
Posted on September 30, 2009An old paper of mine on endowment taxation has been reposted at SSRN here, because it belatedly occurred to me that there was an error in how the tables appeared in it.This is one of my old papers that I relatively like, although the literature it seems to have spawned sometimes seems to me to have a bit too much of an angels-on-a-head-of-a-pin quality...
The new cat
Posted on September 22, 2009Our new cat Seymour still hides out a lot and tends to run away during the day. But in the middle of the night at some point he?ll jump on the bed, start purring and nuzzling, rolling on his back to be petted, etcetera. Then by morning he is gone (although he shows up again to be fed)...
New career as a film star?
Posted on September 22, 2009If you view the trailer that's available here all way to the end, you'll see the first time I've ever been listed in a film's credits as one of its "stars." But unlike several of my co-stars, I didn't make the cut for the trailer.
2010 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium
Posted on September 21, 2009We're far enough into the fall semester that thinking about the spring semester (which perhaps ought to be called the winter semester) no longer seems so fanciful. So I thought I'd post the recently completed schedule for the Tax Policy Colloquium at NYU, which I will be co-leading with Mihir Desai...
Glories of the past
Posted on September 18, 2009OK, the Beatles box set is on back order, but at least I have my Pavement tickets, more than a year in advance of their 9/21/2010 reunion concert in NYC's Central Park. (UPDATE: Pitchfork reports that those tickets sold out in the first two minutes, so you can tell I was on the case...
World fame beckons
Posted on September 18, 2009Apparently I'm very big in Israel, unless it's a separated-at-birth twin.
How NOT to be an "objectively" top-ranked tax law professor
Posted on September 16, 2009Evidently, one way to lower your ranking is to write books, which in recent years I have found myself doing most of the time. Books can't get downloaded on SSRN. Thus, if you spend your time writing them, you do yourself no favors on the frequently published personal or institutional SSRN download rankings, such as this one that appeared today...
Matt Yglesias on why the U.S. will probably default on its debt (implicitly if not formally)
Posted on September 16, 2009In re. why the Chinese are getting nervous about their holdings of U.S. debt, he notes:"It strikes me that any rational person looking at how the health care debate has unfolded is going to grow substantially more skeptical about the ability of the United States to pass major legislation in general...
Addressing uncontrolled federal debt growth
Posted on September 14, 2009Per Andrew Sullivan, there's a recent AEI piece by John Steele Gordon addressing the uncontrolled growth of federal debt. Sullivan notes that it's (of course) too easy on the G.W. Bush Administration, to which I'd add that it also misconceives the core problem and offers dubious solutions...
Bruce Bartlett on the risk of a U.S. government debt default
Posted on September 11, 2009In his column today, he says - and I completely agree: "[M]arkets have always assumed that the federal government would raise taxes as much as necessary to prevent a debt default. That's the primary reason why U.S. Treasury securities are assumed to have zero default risk...
A sucker, or just another hapless (if tail-end) boomer?
Posted on September 08, 2009OK, I've ordered the Beatles box set (stereo - I'm not enough of an audiophile fanatic for the mono). I did so even though the albums are so far past over-familiar to me by now that I generally will only listen to bootlegs and outtakes. Worse still, I'm annoyed that they can't be like Pavement, say, and have greatly expanded reissues exploiting the vast wealth of unissued material out there...
Tax reform recommendations (mine and others)
Posted on September 08, 2009Tax Analysts has just posted "Towards Tax Reform: Recommendations for President Obama's Task Force," consisting of short essays by 32 invited kibitzers of all stripes (law profs, practitioners, economists, journalists, etc.). You can access the entire 130-page document here or my contribution here...
Game-changer?
Posted on August 30, 2009Today we were on the verge of adopting this very placid and sweet-tempered 4-year old male cat named Seymour, when I noticed a mysterious lump on his belly. Could be nothing, but no adoption until the shelter has a vet check him out.
Some interesting health reform ideas
Posted on August 30, 2009With the Obama health reform plan evidently struggling, a host of different (political and substantive) approaches are being suggested. Two in today's NY Times alone.Glenn Hubbard suggests reducing the exclusion for employer-provided healthcare and using the revenue to expand health insurance availability, e...
Krugman comes around?
Posted on August 28, 2009In reading Paul Krugman, it's important to resist Broderism, or centrism for its own sake. For example, his saying harsh things about the Republicans, or arguing that the stimulus package needs to be much bigger than the political consensus has it, sound "extreme" in the standard Washington framework, but ought to be evaluated straight on the merits, where they often prove more convincing than the "reasonable" competition...
Paul Krugman on zombie Reaganism
Posted on August 24, 2009Today Paul Krugman has an op-ed in the NYT asking why Reaganism, which he defines as "an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good," continues to dominate Washington policy debate even though events of the last few years have done so much to discredit it...
The problem with those on-line weather forecasts
Posted on August 23, 2009Say I want to know if it will rain this afternoon between 2 and 5 pm, and the link says 30% for each of the three one-hour segments. Without knowing anything about the correlation, how am I supposed to plan?There seems to be no way of telling where the chance of rain, for the entire period between 2 and 5 pm, falls between the polar answers of 30% and 65...
Healthcare reform
Posted on August 19, 2009The current debate's lack of coherent content has been quite startling, and indeed dismaying insofar as one naively hoped for better. I generally support what the Obama Administration is trying to do (though sometimes what that is, isn't entirely clear)...
Woodstock, 40 years later
Posted on August 15, 2009Was I there at the time? Yes, if you're willing to count being a pre-teen in the back seat of my parents' car, caught in the very outskirts of the miles-and-miles-wide traffic jam as we drove to or fro a vacation site.Woodstock's little secret (not that my knowledge of this comes from back then) is that most of the music wasn't very good...
"Keep the guvmint off my Medicare"
Posted on August 11, 2009The widespread view among healthcare reform foes that Medicare is not a government program inclines me to ask: If Obama gets away with this, what is the government going to take over next? Social Security?!?!?
Another day, another review
Posted on August 11, 2009Alan Viard, in the latest National Tax Journal (Vol LXII, No. 2, June 2009), says the following about Institutional Foundations of Public Finance, the recently published conference volume (in honor of David Bradford) that I co-edited with Alan Auerbach:"The book is exceptionally well suited to serve as a tribute to David Bradford...
Quote of the day
Posted on August 05, 2009From Captain Beefheart, in an excellent 1978 live album called "I'm Gonna Do What I Wanna Do" (that being his verbal response to audience requests for favorite songs):"It's very hard to do poetry in this world of Denny's staying open all night."But no harder, I suppose, than trying to revise the introduction to my new book while riding the NYC subway and listening to said live album...
Go ahead, make my day
Posted on August 05, 2009Perhaps I can be forgiven for quoting highlights from the brief review of my book, Decoding the Corporate Tax (available here or here), in the August 2009 issue of Choice Magazine. "Shaviro (New York Univ. Law School), a distinguished tax scholar, does a masterful job of bringing the critiques together and explaining their logic in a concise, lucid manner...
Another day, another article
Posted on July 31, 2009I've initiated posting on SSRN my new short (7,000 words) article, "The 2008-09 Financial Crisis: Implications for Income Tax Reform," and will post the link when it's up.The paper is based on PowerPoint slides for a talk I gave in Milan (or actually from NYC via skype) earlier this year, as per the preceding blog entry...
Oops, more delays
Posted on July 21, 2009If there's one thing I really want to accomplish over the rest of the summer - other than taking advantage of the NYC farmers markets' fresh fruit bonanza while it lasts - it's to make serious progress on my international tax book, which has taken very definite form inside my head but needs to be extracted and actualized...
Oxford talks on U.S. international taxation
Posted on July 20, 2009Powerpoint slides for the two talks that I gave a couple of weeks back in Oxford are now available on-line here.The one from July 7, "Planning and Policy Issues Raised by the Structure of the U.S. International Tax Rules," is based on chapter 2 of my book-in-progress...
Back in the U.S.A.
Posted on July 19, 2009After a whirlwind week of sightseeing in London, we're back home and only slightly jet-lagged.Although I'm a summerphile with a taste for heat (at least up to the mid-80s), London's weather was reasonably pleasant. There's seemingly a rule there that it has to spritz at least briefly every day, no matter how sunny it may look in the morning, but for the most part we had decent weather...
U.K. vs. U.S. international tax policy
Posted on July 19, 2009My trip to Oxford earlier this month for a pair of conferences, one academic and the other mainly business and government, gave me a close-up look at how tax policymaking differs both substantively and procedurally in the two countries.Substantively, the differences are pretty clear...
A week in Oxford
Posted on July 10, 2009I've just completed a week in Oxford (with family), attending a Summer Symposium and a Summer Conference held by the Centre for Business Taxation at the Said Business School at Oxford. More shortly on the substance, including my own two talks (one on the main problems with the U...
On the road again
Posted on July 02, 2009Last week (June 22-26) I was at an international tax conference in Berkeley. As it was devoted to looking at existing literature, I didn't hear much that was new to me while there.Tomorrow I'm off again to another international tax conference, this one in Oxford at the Said Business School (July 6-10) and involving a number of new papers or talks...
Tax expenditure analysis at the Joint Committee on Taxation
Posted on July 02, 2009While Ed Kleinbard was Chief of Staff at the Joint Committee on Taxation, he sought to modify and revive tax expenditure analysis, along grounds which I thought added to its usefulness and intellectual coherence. What is going to happen to JCT's tax expenditure analysis now that Ed has moved on to USC Law School?From an interview with new JCT chief of staff Tom Barthold in the June 29 edition of Tax Notes:TA: Your predecessor also focused a lot on the tax expenditure issue and, for example, looking at how to define expenditures...
California's budget crisis and the upcoming federal budget crisis
Posted on July 02, 2009California is teetering on the budgetary cliff these days, issuing IOUs in lieu of meeting its obligations because it can't adopt a plan to close the budget gap even though it is wealthy enough to do so without serious difficulty.The IOUs remind me of the line in Duck Soup, where Groucho asks Ambassador Trentino for a personal loan until payday and offers a 30-day note...
Back from Berkeley
Posted on June 27, 2009I've just returned from a week of sessions on international tax policy that I attended in Berkeley this past week. My sense that I am on exactly the right track in my current book in progress, and that it will offer a significant contribution, is if anything firmer now than it was before...
Shadow, 1991(?)-2009
Posted on June 27, 2009Today, with a bit of heart-wrenching assistance on the home front, Shadow met his end. At age 18, his body was breaking down on several fronts, with multiple severe conditions that required a very high level of active daily care - seemingly inadequate, however, so far as we could tell, to give him a decent quality of life...
Finally, a reason to live in Washington!
Posted on June 19, 2009... So as NOT to subscribe to the Washington Post, now that it has fired its only good print or on-line political columnist, Dan Froomkin, for political incorrectness as defined from a neoconservative perspective.I already don't and wouldn't subscribe to the Post, but living in Washington would make it more pointed...
Recent diversions
Posted on June 15, 2009Mark Maxwell's novel Nixoncarver; Lily Allen (both albums but especially It's Not Me, It's You). The first is mainly for hardcore Nixon (and to a lesser extent Carver) fans; the latter should be (and is) for lots of people.Not sure I like my new green background on the top, but it's for Iranian solidarity.
Battle of the revenue estimates
Posted on June 12, 2009As noted in several news articles with links at the TaxProf blog, the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that President Obama's international tax proposals will bring in about $50 billion less than the Administration had estimated, over the period from 2011 (when the proposals would take effect) through 2019...
Remiss?
Posted on June 10, 2009Not many blog entries lately, because in summer my engagements reduce sufficiently that I'm not distracted and running from one thing to another. Instead, I can focus at work on my writing, and my energy goes into that. I'm nearly done with chapter 2 (not counting a short intro chapter) of a book on U...
Fool me once, shame on you ...
Posted on June 02, 2009... but needless to say, fool me twice and it's shame on me. By these lights, our cat Buddy (a.k.a. the Wascally Wabbit) succeeded in shaming us the other day.Perhaps 3 years ago, we had a period when we would occasionally let him go out into our small, fence-surrounded backyard...
Latest publication
Posted on May 28, 2009A short article of mine, "Internationalization of Income Measures and the U.S. Book?Tax Relationship," just came out in the National Tax Journal. Not available on-line (other than the abstract), and I don't seem to have posted it on SSRN, but the cite is 62 N...
Doug Holtz-Eakin talks up new conservative think tank
Posted on May 27, 2009I admit to having been hard occasionally on Doug Holtz-Eakin during the 2008 presidential campaign. I had three reasons for this: (1) at times he deserved it, (2) I expected better from him, and (3) he risked harming his entire profession's public reputation through egregious flacking that should have been left to others in the McCain campaign...
Summer's here and ...
Posted on May 17, 2009So far I've written a 1,000 word piece on tax reform ideas for a U.S. publication, another of 5,000 words on the Administration's international tax proposals for a U.K. publication (the U.K. is preparing international tax changes in the opposite direction), and better nailed down my plans for an as yet untitled but perhaps 15% written book on U...
Cheney
Posted on May 13, 2009I've been following the man's antics with amazement. He's obviously a very disturbed individual. I've heard privately from people who worked in national security in the Bush Administration that he had a fascination with torture and would keep after it even when begged by his associates to give it a rest...
Charming show
Posted on May 11, 2009Yesterday, to celebrate Mother's Day plus certain household members' birthdays, a close fambly group of us went to see Coraline at the Lucille Lortel Theater - this being the stage musical version, with songs by Magnetic Fields / 69 Love Songs genius (if I may say so) Stephin Merritt, rather than the movie that I have thus far avoided (based on my perhaps unjustly suspecting it of being Disneyesquely cloying)...
Radio appearance off the usual circuit for me
Posted on May 06, 2009Today I discussed the Obama Administration's international tax plan on a Jamaican radio show, Evening Edition Newstalk 93 FM. I assume the interest over there lies in concern that Jamaica is one of the tax-friendly locations being targeted by the plan...
The Obama Administration's new international tax proposals
Posted on May 04, 2009I'm still trying to get a preliminary handle on the Obama Administration's international tax proposals. The fullest description I've yet been able to find, from a White House fact sheet, is available here.The fact sheet opens by stating that the White House's key concern is about jobs fleeing the U...
The New York Mets
Posted on May 01, 2009I'm a Mets fan, not by choice, but because I have no choice. The affliction first struck me before my 7th birthday, and there's really nothing I can do about it now.Queue here the Macbeth quote:MACBETH: Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd;Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow;Raze out the written troubles of the brain;And with some sweet oblivious antidote,Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuffWhich weighs upon the heart?DOCTOR: Therein the patientMust minister to himself...
Virtually there
Posted on April 30, 2009As I noted in my last post, today I was supposed to be in Milan, Italy, participating in a panel at a conference entitled "Tax Policy and the Financial Crisis," held by Econpubblica, the Center for Research on the Economics of the Public Sector at Milan's Universita Bocconi...
Ouch
Posted on April 28, 2009The semester is now over, and I was supposed to be (at this very hour) headed to JFK Airport to fly to Milan, where I'm scheduled to appear on Thursday, April 30 at an Econpubblica, Universita Bocconi conference entitled "Tax Policy and the Financial Crisis...
Final NYU Tax Policy Colloquium of 2009
Posted on April 24, 2009Yesterday we had our final session, featuring Tom Brennan's Certainty and Uncertainty in the Taxation of Risky Returns.Tom's article, still in early draft form, is a contribution to the extensive Domar-Musgrave literature on the treatment of risk in an income or consumption tax...
Torture revelations
Posted on April 22, 2009I've been staying away from the Bush Administration torture controversy as it really isn't anywhere near my area of expertise, but I must say, the new revelations that one motivation for torture may have been to generate "evidence" of al Qaeda-Saddam ties truly takes it to a new level.
Interesting new development
Posted on April 21, 2009According to the Daily Tax Report (subscribers only, so this link may not work for all users):"Edward Kleinbard is leaving the Joint Committee on Taxation after nearly 20 months as its chief of staff, lobbyists and congressional staffers said April 21...
It's Curry Time!!
Posted on April 21, 2009My basketball-playing, basketball-fan son and I had been watching some Knicks games during the season, are now watching the NBA playoffs, and have developed a new phrase: "It's Curry Time!" Trademark pending.(Based on the overweight, unmotivated, perpetually injured and indifferent Knicks player, Eddie Curry, who has about an $18 million annual salary but who played only about 5 minutes this year, during which time the Knicks were badly outscored...
Chicken game
Posted on April 21, 2009Considering the shape that Chrysler is in, it would be amusing, if it weren't so contemptible, that the company opted for expensive private financing in lieu of cheaper bailout financing, in order to avoid limits on executive compensation.I read some speculation that this was to make it easier for Chrysler to conclude the Fiat deal - although Fiat presumably doesn't care about current Chrysler executives' compensation levels (so the argument would have to be about people it brings in)...
NYU Tax Policy Colloquium on Mitchell Kane's Taxation and Global Cap and Trade
Posted on April 17, 2009Neither I personally nor the colloquium have focused as much in the past as we are likely to in the future on the carbon taxes/cap and trade set of issues. (I've never written about these issues because I don't as yet see the angle or intellectual arbitrage opportunities using my skill set...
Tomorrow may rain so, I'll follow the sun
Posted on April 14, 2009As you can perhaps see, Shadow (left) and Ursula (center) are doing a lot better these days, though Shadow remains a bit creaky. He's been scoring Passover gefilte fish lately. Buddy (right) spends his days proving that there's nothing like high spirits (and limited calories, despite his best efforts) to keep the mind clear and the body healthy.
Tax Policy Colloquium on Desai & Dharmapala, Investor Taxation in Open Economies
Posted on April 11, 2009This past Thursday we discussed the above paper proposing "global portfolio neutrality," or GPN, as a new entry in the alphabet soup of proposed international tax norms (joining CEN, CIN, CON, NN, and NON). GPN holds that national as well as worldwide efficiency is maximized by causing individuals to face the same tax rate on their portfolio holdings no matter where they invest...
Dismaying encounter
Posted on April 10, 2009Earlier this week I had coffee with a former colleague, now eminent outside the legal academy, who was in town for a few days. He's very much to the right of me politically, but someone I've always respected as intelligent, thoughtful, and intellectually honest...
2010 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium - great news
Posted on April 09, 2009I'm pleased to be able to announce that my co-teacher for the 2010 Tax Policy Colloquium will be Mihir Desai.
Sessions at U Va and NYU
Posted on April 07, 2009I'll often blog about my talks or conference appearances and such, but have lately been too busy and backed up at work to spare the time. But at a certain point it gets so bad that it really doesn't matter any more at the margin if you ignore your main responsibilities for a bit...
Tax policy colloquium on Lily Batchelder's Savings Incentives with Insurance Objectives: A Bankrupt Approach?
Posted on April 05, 2009Last Thursday we discussed Lily Batchelder's new draft paper (still a work in progress), which argues that savings incentives in the tax code are poorly designed to advance insurance objectives for poorer individuals. She notes low responsiveness to the rules in present law, and their generally providing larger incentives to higher-income individuals who arguably are saving enough already...
Act now while supplies last
Posted on April 05, 2009My new book, Decoding the Corporate Tax, is now available directly from both Amazon and Barnes & Noble (albeit with the wrong title).
Fraud and cheating synergies
Posted on March 31, 2009From an ABC News story on AIG renegade executive Joseph Cassano, the infamous head of their Financial Products Division:"Cassano set up some dozens of separate companies, some off-shore, to handle the transactions, effectively keeping them off the books of AIG and out of sight of regulators in the U...
The real problem with Twitter
Posted on March 31, 2009To do it right takes too long. How can you be interesting, fun, & worth reading in only 140 characters without taking all day? (time?s up)
Tax policy colloquium on Emmanuel Saez's "Details Matter"
Posted on March 31, 2009Last Thursday, we started our post-spring break Tax Policy Colloquium final stretch run with Emmanuel Saez's "Details Matter: The Impact of Presentation and Information on the Take-Up of Financial Incentives for Retirement Saving." The paper analyzes a large-scale real world field experiment with H&R Block in St...
Payback from China continues
Posted on March 24, 2009The head of China's central bank is now calling for the dollar to be dethroned as the world's reserve currency and replaced by a new IMF-controlled benchmark.I doubt anything will come of this right away, and if I were the Chinese I might not even want immediate adoption of this proposal (which could devalue their vast dollar holdings), but this may well be the way we are headed...
Reasons to visit Washington
Posted on March 23, 2009My family went site-seeing in Washington D.C. while I was going to a conference at the Washington University in St. Louis. Conceptual togetherness even when apart? They returned with this lovely photo, which they rightly surmised that I would enjoy...
Are Chicago economists deaf, dumb, and blind? (One of these three especially)
Posted on March 21, 2009Economists' debates about whether Keynesian stimulus can work are outside my core area of professional expertise, but I do feel that I know something about the issues.For that reason, courtesy of a recent blog entry by Brad DeLong, I couldn't help commenting how laughable it is that U of Chicago Business School economist John Cochrane apparently believes that the principle of Ricardian equivalence helps prove that Keynesian stimulus necessarily must be ineffective...
Washington University Law School budget conference
Posted on March 21, 2009I am sitting in a hotel lounge (better-appointed than the available ones at the airport) waiting for the departure time of a flight out of St. Louis, where I just spent the last two days at a budget conference organized by Cheryl Block of WULS. Lots of interesting sessions, on topics ranging from automatic budgetary changes (such as entitlements cuts) to restore fiscal sustainability, to how the Presidential and legislative budget processes do and should function (e...
AIG bonus update
Posted on March 21, 2009I now feel a bit more knowledgeable about the AIG bonus situation than the last time I posted about it, so here are some follow-up thoughts:1) Words sure matter. If they hadn't called these things "bonuses," obviously no trouble. The underlying situation seems to have been as follows...
How did people understand the brain before computers?
Posted on March 18, 2009On the tennis court recently, I had been playing very well, then I lost my strokes and floundered horribly for a couple of sessions, then I was able to find them again and played very well this week.The analogy that seems utterly compelling to me is that of a computer file somewhere in your system that you need to locate and access quickly in order to run a particular program in real time...
AIG bonus tax
Posted on March 17, 2009I was angered by the AIG bonuses. Sure, it's a bit of a pop symbolism issue, but I found it odious that these Typhoid Marys of finance - who ought to be unemployable for life, other than asking if you want fries with that, after all that they've done to their shareholders and the world economy - should get all those million dollar bonuses out of federal money, supposedly so they won't leave, when some already have and the rest probably should...
Tax policy colloquium on David Duff's "Tax Fairness and the Tax Mix"
Posted on March 13, 2009Yesterday we had our ninth session of the year, and last before spring break, discussing the above article by David Duff, who has long been at the University of Toronto Law School but is moving to the University of British Columbia Law School, in Vancouver...
We may have waited too long to clone Shadow ...
Posted on March 13, 2009Followers of my cats will be glad to hear that Ursula, knock on wood, is doing a lot better. She's overcome her kidney infection and now just needs a couple of water shots a week. She's silky and active as ever, and has a better appetite than she's had for months if not years...
This is how it starts
Posted on March 13, 2009Alternative title: "Well, duh."From the New York Times:"The Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, spoke in unusually blunt terms on Friday about the 'safety' of China?s $1 trillion investment in American government debt, the world?s largest such holding, and urged the Obama administration to offer assurances that the securities would maintain their value...
Should the U.S. restate past years' GDP?
Posted on March 11, 2009At one point during my book session at the Urban Institute today, I made the comment that, just as the SEC sometimes makes companies restate past years? income which turns out to have been partly sham, so maybe the U.S. should have to restate GDP for the last few years...
Urban Institute event on Decoding the Corporate Tax
Posted on March 11, 2009This morning, I attended a book event at the Urban Institute discussing my corporate tax book. Good crowd, maybe about 80 people, apparently plus a webcast audience. My PowerPoint slides for my portion of the event are available here.Greg Ip of the Economist was the moderator, and the discussants were Rosanne Altshuler of Urban/Rutgers Economics, Dan Halperin of Harvard Law School, and Pam Olson of Skadden Arps (formerly Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Policy)...
Tax policy colloquium on Michael Doran's "Managers, Shareholders, and the Double Corporate Tax"
Posted on March 06, 2009Yesterday's discussion returned to more traditional law school tax policy fare, concerning corporate integration and the Bush Administration's partly failed 2003 attempt to accomplish it via dividend exemption. Michael's thesis in his paper is that the political economy story developed in prior work, such as the well-known article by Jennifer Arlen and Deborah Weiss, needs to be revised...
Tax policy colloquium on Leslie McCall's "Americans' Social Policy Preferences in the Era of Rising Inequality."
Posted on March 03, 2009Upcoming D.C. panel on "Decoding the Corporate Tax"
Posted on February 26, 2009Here is a link for a forthcoming event in Washington, D.C., at the Urban Institute (2100 M Street) on Wednesday, March 11, from 9:00 to 10:30 am, discussing my new book on corporate taxation.Official description of the event is as follows:Significant reform of the U...
AEI session on Viard (ed.), Tax Policy: Lessons from the 2000s
Posted on February 25, 2009This morning I appeared as a discussant at an AEI book panel in Washington, concerning the above book. I offered comments on 3 excellent papers, by (1) Alan Viard and John Diamond concerning unfinanced tax cuts, (2) Dhammika Dharmalapa concerning the 2003 dividend tax cuts, and (3) Alan Auerbach and Kevin Hassett concerning the dividend tax cuts and bonus depreciation...
U.S. fiscal situation
Posted on February 25, 2009Having found the time to read the Auerbach-Gale fiscal gap paper more carefully than when I recently posted about it, the following points seem especially pertinent:(1) We have a really huge fiscal sustainability problem that the financial crisis has made significantly worse, but that the stimulus legislation, if its provisions generally expire in a couple of years as expected, affects only slightly...
Interview concerning my new book
Posted on February 25, 2009A brief NYU interview concerning my new book, Decoding the Corporate Tax, is now available here.
But seriously folks
Posted on February 24, 2009The busier you are, the more you need to waste time. Today, facing numerous pressing tasks, I started from a link at aldaily.com and found my way to an ancient Greek joke book, the oldest known & extant one, which actually can be read on-line here.Samples of ancient Greek humor, which certainly ought to make us feel better about our own comic tradition, include the following:An Abderite saw a eunuch talking to a woman and asked if she was his wife...
Upcoming appearances
Posted on February 23, 2009I was just interviewed regarding my new book Decoding the Corporate Income Tax for the NYU Law website. I'll post the link when it's up.This Wednesday, I'll be at the American Enterprise Institute for a book panel from 9:00 to 10:30 concerning their newly published paper collection, Alan Viard (ed...
Gov. Bobby Jindal's family values
Posted on February 23, 2009One is hardly surprised by Governor Jindal's eagerness to position himself for the 2012 Republican nomination contest by showily turning down a tiny piece of the stimulus funding. But it's sobering to think that there will likely be children going to bed hungry because he decided to grandstand with regard to unemployment benefits.
Musical and literary update
Posted on February 22, 2009I've been listening lately to Amy Rigby (among lots of other things), having come across reviews of her new album with Wreckless Eric, which I still don't have (though it's attractively priced as an Amazon mp3 download). Sampling her older stuff, initially I had to get past the fact that stylistically it really isn't anything new - Dylan '66/Byrds folk-rock and late-70s powerpop are among the obvious influences...
Tax policy colloquium on Yoram Margalioth's "Employing Statistical Stigma as a Welfare Ordeal"
Posted on February 21, 2009Last Thursday, we discussed Yoram Margalioth's "Employing Statistical Stigma as a Welfare Ordeal." In the welfare literature, stigma, leading to low take-up of benefits by eligible individuals, has been viewed as purely a bad thing, to be minimized, not only because it inflicts a bad experience on benefit claimants but because it discourages claiming by intended beneficiaries...
Bad weather ahead
Posted on February 20, 2009From the abstract of the new Auerbach-Gale article, The Economic Crisis and the Fiscal Crisis: 2009 and Beyond:"In 2009, the federal deficit will be larger as a share of the economy than at any time since World War II. The current deficit is due in part to economic weakness and the stimulus, and in part to policy choices made in the past...
A step towards more honest budgetary accounting
Posted on February 20, 2009The Obama Administration deserves generous plaudits and hosannas for this.
2-9/10 cheers for flu shots
Posted on February 20, 2009I got one last fall. Late last week, I suddenly felt what seemed to be a cold coming on. Then it turned into a couple of days of wipeout, with low fever but well short of the three-alarm job I remember from 9 years ago. Given the relative mildness, I was wondering if it was actually a bad cold rather than the flu, since one really expects a bit more from the latter (pounding headaches, dizziness, loss of appetite, weeks of exhaustion, etcetera)...
Institutional Foundations of Hackery
Posted on February 20, 2009The blog post title above is a backhand reference to the title of my recently published book, Institutional Foundations of Public Finance, co-edited with Alan Auerbach, and collecting the excellent papers from a 2006 conference at NYU Law School in honor of David Bradford...
Tax policy colloquium on Dorothy Brown's "Shades of the American Dream"
Posted on February 13, 2009Yesterday we had a lively session, terminated by the clock when it was still going strong, on Dorothy Brown's "Shades of the American Dream."The paper argues that the income tax rules for homeowners (exclude imputed rent, allow mortgage interest and real property deductions, disallow losses on sale but also exclude most gains) unfairly disadvantage African-Americans, who take less advantage of the rules than whites...
My two favorite cartoons concerning the stimulus battle
Posted on February 10, 2009One is by David Horsey, and the other is by Ed Stein.
My latest book is now available
Posted on February 10, 2009My latest book, Decoding the Corporate Tax, is now available here on the Urban Institute Press website.Not to lay it on too thick, but the cover blurbs are as follows. From David Weisbach: "Decoding the U.S. Corporate Tax is a concise and clearly written review of the corporate tax structure and its economic and distributional consequences...
Tax policy colloquium on Amy Finkelstein's ?EZ-Tax: Tax Salience and Tax Rates?
Posted on February 09, 2009Last Thursday, we discussed Amy Finkelstein's very interesting above-named article, which shows that adoption of EZ-Pass appears to lead to higher tolls, as well as to reduced consumer elasticity of response to the tolls, because not paying cash at the tollbooth reduces one's awareness of the charge...
Hypocrisy?
Posted on February 08, 2009After complaining about ineffective stimulus or non-stimulus proposals in the House bill, the Senate has not only eliminated some of the most unambiguously effective stuff, such as $40 billion to head off state and local government spending cuts (by definition "shovel-ready") - it has also put in a $70 billion alternative minimum tax (AMT) patch for 2009...
Sad news
Posted on February 04, 2009This made me quite sad. I didn't know him personally, and never bought one of his fabled peelers, but he was a riotous and delightful presence at the Union Square Greenmarket, which I haunt so incessantly during the summer and fall months (mainly for fresh fruit) that I'm worried they'll start charging me rent.
AALS call for papers on property & tax law intersections
Posted on February 03, 2009Nancy Staudt of Northwestern Law School, an old friend who happens to have been the second-ever presenter at the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium (way back in January 1996), asked me to post the following item:CALL FOR PAPERSThe Property and Taxation Sections of the AALS are seeking to co-sponsor a half day session at the annual AALS meeting next year (January, 2010) in New Orleans...
Glamorous 5:30 am slot
Posted on February 02, 2009I just did a 3 or 4-minute live radio slot on KCBS out of San Francisco, concerning the alternative minimum tax (AMT) patch in the Senate stimulus bill. Time of the appearance was a humane 8:30 am here in the East Coast, but as it was 5:30 am in the broadcast area I doubt there were all that many millions of listeners...
New York Times on-line forum on Geithner's and Daschle's tax problems
Posted on February 02, 2009I was invited today to participate in an on-line New York Times forum concerning Geithner's and Daschle's tax problems. As you can see if you go there, the participant responses had a range that would do the movie Rashomon proud, ranging from "No Moral Turpitude" to "Fundamentally Corrupt...
Tax policy colloquium with Ed Kleinbard on the JCT's tax expenditures pamphlet
Posted on January 30, 2009Yesterday we had our third session of the year, with Ed Kleinbard (Chief of Staff at the Joint Committee on Taxation) concerning the recent JCT pamphlet(s) on tax expenditure analysis.This is a topic I've written and thought about a lot, such as in Rethinking Tax Expenditures and Fiscal Language, 57 Tax Law Review 187 (2004) (draft version available here), reworked (and shortened) as chapter 8 of my recent book Taxes, Spending, and the U...
So far, so good?
Posted on January 29, 2009The stimulus bill as it passed the House does, it's true, contain the rule extending carrybacks for NOLs to 5 years. As I discussed here, this is probably a bad idea on balance, although the Tax Policy Center was generous enough to give it a B.But at least the thoroughly silly proposal to reward private equity firms for buying back their debt at a discount instead of boosting employment did not make it into the House bill...
My tax & accounting article comes out
Posted on January 26, 2009The Georgetown Law Journal has now officially published my article, The Optimal Relationship Between Taxable Income and Financial Accounting Income. Here is the link, and the abstract is as follows: The persistence of the book-tax gap, or excess of companies? reported financial accounting income over their taxable income, suggests that accounting manipulation and tax sheltering remain significant problems, even in the aftermath of the ?Enron era...
Tax policy colloquium on Auerbach's "Understanding U.S. Corporate Tax Losses"
Posted on January 23, 2009Yesterday, with the help of Bill Gentry (Williams College/Columbia Law School) as guest commentator, we discussed co-convener Alan Auerbach's paper (with Rosanne Altshuler & two Treasury economists), "Understanding U.S. Corporate Tax Losses." The paper analyzes a puzzle: why corporations had so many more tax losses during the relatively mild recession of 2001-02 than during the previous and otherwise comparable recession ten years earlier...
Another tax stimulus proposal
Posted on January 23, 2009Everett Ehrlich has written a paper on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urging another business tax stimulus measure: permitting companies, for the next two years, to avoid paying tax when they repurchase their debts at a discount. Thus, to use his lead example, suppose a company that owes the banks a dollar gets to buy back the debt for only 75 cents...
Changing of the guard
Posted on January 20, 2009Any regular reader of this blog will know how immensely relieved I am that, at long last, the odious Bush Administration has ended. Most of you probably share this feeling, though I'd hope to have at least a few readers from across the spectrum.I have a sufficiently oppositional personality that I have come to feel, at a minimum, cynical and sarcastic (and often more than that) regarding every Administration since Johnson...
Happiest word in the English language
Posted on January 20, 2009"Ex," when placed with a dash in front of the words "President George W. Bush."I smiled when I saw this word today.
Matt Taibbi nails Thomas Friedman to the floor once again
Posted on January 17, 2009To me, Friedman is so drearily unreadable that, despite subscribing to the Times plus frequently reading it on-line, I need bloggers to tell me what he actually says. Thank goodness for Matt Taibbi (print journalist but available on-line), whose review of Friedman's latest admittedly falls just a smidgen short of his all-time classic review of The World is Flat, which I linked when it came out and am happy to link once again.
First NYU Tax Policy Colloquium session
Posted on January 16, 2009Yesterday was day 1 of the spring (can I call it that when it's 10 degrees outside?) 2009 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium. In the public afternoon session (we also meet with students in the AM), we covered my forthcoming paper, The Long-Term Fiscal Gap: Is the Main Problem Generational Inequity? I hope it's not terrible of me to say: I really do like this paper...
Get well soon
Posted on January 13, 2009Ursula, the lovely little creature shown here in two views, stopped eating and drinking late last week, evidently feeling very sick, and she got severely dehydrated. We had to bring her to the veterinary hospital, where she has been getting IV fluids for the last few days...
Out with the old, in with the new
Posted on January 12, 2009My Tax I students from last semester will probably be glad to hear that I have submitted my grades. I am even gladder to reflect on the closely associated fact that I have finished grading their exams.Grading exams is by far the worst part of a law prof's work - nothing else is even close...
Bush economic policy post-mortems
Posted on January 12, 2009From today's Washington Post, here are Bush's very best economic reviews, coming as they do from people on the conservative / Republican side.From former McCain economic adviser: Doug Holtz-Eakin: "The expansion was a continuation of the way the U.S...
Health club morons
Posted on January 09, 2009Here's the sort of thing that ruffles my otherwise sunny disposition.My health club is always crowded in early January - the marginal attendees either are working off their holiday weight or else haven't abandoned their New Year's resolutions yet. There is a particular type of elliptical machine I favor, and 4 of the 5 were in use when I got there this morning...
Obama's proposal to extend the carryback for NOLs
Posted on January 07, 2009I have mixed feelings about this part of Obama's proposed stimulus package. On the one hand, if not for pervasive income mismeasurement by the tax system it would be madness not to treat losses as fully refundable. Otherwise, one discourages risk-bearing (since the government in effect says "heads we win, tails you lose") and offers inefficient incentives for corporate conglomerates (so one activity's losses can be deducted against another's gains)...
Life versus the movies
Posted on December 24, 2008On Christmas Eve we watched the 1951 Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol. Scrooge as portrayed by Sim (pre-redemption) forcefully, unremittingly reminded me of Cheney. But Cheney is both far worse and utterly irredeemable.Someone (me?) should write a satirical Christmas Carol knock-off starring Cheney...
For greater efficiency, eliminate the middleman
Posted on December 23, 2008I realize I'm repeating myself from a post a couple of years ago, but wouldn't it be more efficient in baseball to eliminate the middleman (the players) by simply permitting the Yankees to purchase wins and championships directly?E.g., it's the bottom of the 9th inning of game 162 with the Red Sox (or better yet the Rays) in new Yankee Stadium...
The cult of home ownership
Posted on December 21, 2008Good article in today's Times about how the Bush Administraton helped light the fuse under the current economic meltdown by pushing universal home ownership and hence encouraging bad mortgage loans.Needless to say, there's plenty of blame to go around...
What was Madoff doing?
Posted on December 20, 2008One of the big questions about Madoff's insane scam is how he thought he would get away with it. Ponzi schemes are inherently unstable, and yet there are indications that he was running this one for decades.br /br /I've read nothing in the media really explaining what he was up to, or why he crashed at this point, perhaps because no one knows...
Perverse satisfaction?
Posted on December 19, 2008Today's New York Times notes that a tax break for homeowners, enacted in 1997, may have contributed to the housing bubble that (coupled with pathological defects in our financial markets) did so much to bring us to our grim current economic situation...
That didn't take long
Posted on December 15, 2008In 2004, Congress enacted a temporary dividends received deduction for U.S. multinationals that repatriated foreign earnings. Under the temporary DRD, the tax rate on dividends from foreign subsidiaries effectively was lowered from as high as 35 percent to just 5...
Cat pandering
Posted on December 13, 2008Couldn't resist posting this shot of Buddy, a.k.a. the "bad little bunny." Elmer Fudd wouldn't have liked him, nor Yosemite Sam nor Marvin the Martian, but we actually cherish his foibles.
Reasons to be cheerful
Posted on December 12, 20081) I've finally gotten to the end of a huge to-do list that's been hounding me, and frequently growing faster than I could cross things off it, since mid-July. While a new to-do list, possibly a lot worse than the last, is starting to loom and will be having its malign way with me by early January, for the moment I can't or shouldn't do most of those things yet...
Meanwhile, back at the ranch ...
Posted on December 11, 2008Aided by my enforced downtime (with fewer time-wasting temptations) during jury duty, I have completed a draft of a short article (under 6,000 words) entitled "Internationalization of Income Measures and the U.S. Book-Tax Relationship." It is in part a highly compressed reprise of the line of analysis here (forthcoming shortly in the Georgetown Law Journal), although it also addresses the question of how cross-border convergence in defining taxable and financial income might affect the tradeoffs I identify...
Feedback requested
Posted on December 09, 2008I have a new book forthcoming from the Urban Institute Press, probably next month. My working title was "The U.S. Corporate Tax: What Is It, and Where Is It Headed?"Now I hear from the Press that they propose to cut the subtitle and simply call it "The U...
Jury duty
Posted on December 08, 2008Today I showed up in Chinatown for jury duty, which I had put off twice (out of town the first time, teaching my Tax I class the second). Wouldn't you know it, I got picked for a jury. Civil trial, and I am hoping it will be very short or perhaps will even settle...
Someone's got to take out the trash
Posted on December 07, 2008Amazing article in today's Times about Moody's. They used to refuse any compensation from the issuers they were rating, because this would create a conflict of interest and undermine their credibility. Then they decided to be compensated by those businesses...
End of the semester
Posted on December 05, 2008I have just completed teaching my last Tax I class of the fall 2008 semester. I'm always ambivalent when this happens. Certainly, having more free time until the next semester is welcome; teaching has elements of being a chore and isn't necessarily the main reason one goes into this line of work...
Dinosaur poem I once wrote for my kids
Posted on December 03, 2008Maybe ten years ago or so or more, I wrote them this little doggerel number while we were at Rye Playland early in the summer. I recently spotted it in my closet. With apologies to Robert Bakker (for his dinosaur novel Raptor Red), and for the historical inaccuracies regarding which species actually coexisted with velociraptors:The duckbill herd had drunk its fillThought Raptor Red: "It's time to kill...
Studied ambiguity?
Posted on December 01, 2008For what it's worth, I gather from the Tax Prof Blog that the artificial intelligence program at Gender Analyzer rates this blog as (only?) 61 percent likely to be written by a man, making it the closest to gender-neutral among a group of tax blogs other than the Tax Prof Blog itself, which comes in at 52%...
Loser culture
Posted on December 01, 2008Why are the U.S.-owned car companies so bad? Presumably the reason is ingrained corporate culture. They spent decades as oligopolists, protected from foreign competition because World War II had leveled the rest of the industrial world. Plus, barriers to entry in the car business prevented domestic turnover a la Microsoft supplanting IBM...
Preparing to pivot
Posted on November 27, 2008The tricky move the Obama Administration faces in budget policy is to go lax in the short run, given the need for stimulus to fight off recession, but then to steer back towards fiscal sustainability, with the drop-dead date possibly having been moved up from, say, the early 2020s to the late 2010s...
There's got to be a metaphor in here somewhere
Posted on November 26, 2008But even if not, an amusing photo.Yes, those are baby skunks that she has evidently adopted.
Confession of a deficit hawk
Posted on November 22, 2008Before the financial crisis hit, the U.S. appeared to be headed towards a fiscal calamity, probably no later than the early 2020s. The likely doomsday date has surely moved several years closer, perhaps to some point in the late 2010s.I nonetheless accept the need for something like Obama's Economic Recovery Plan, and also agree that this is the time to do healthcare...
If I were a billionaire
Posted on November 20, 2008Certainly, under those circumstances, I'd be tempted to consider paying $50,000 to have our 18-year-old cat Shadow cloned, although I gather the cat cloning business isn't going so well. People raise ethical questions about cat cloning, rightly enough given all the unwanted strays, but Shadow, with his astonishingly good temperament (if we could recreate it), surely is a special case...
Which do you want first, the bad news or the good news?
Posted on November 20, 2008Bad news, you say? The Dow fell 445 points today.The good news is that it can only happen 17 more times, then we'll be done.
Rangel corporate rate cut proposal
Posted on November 16, 2008From Bloomberg, courtesy of Tax Prof:"New York Representative Charles Rangel said he's revising his tax overhaul proposal to reduce U.S. corporate tax rates to 28 percent, down from the current rate of 35 percent .... [to be financed] by targeting special-interest provisions that favor some industries and companies over others...
Act now while supplies last
Posted on November 15, 2008My latest article, The Long-Term U.S. Fiscal Gap: Is the Main Problem Generational Inequity?, is now available on SSRN here.Abstract is as follows:Current U.S. budget policy is unsustainable because it violates the intertemporal budget constraint. While the resulting fiscal gap will eventually be eliminated whether we like it or not, the big issue in current budget debate is whether the ultimately unavoidable course corrections should start now or be left for later...
Colloquium presentation at Loyola LA
Posted on November 11, 2008Yesterday I presented my forthcoming budget policy paper, The Long-Term U.S. Fiscal Gap: Is the Main Problem Generational Inequity? [to be posted on SSRN & linked here shortly], at Loyola Los Angeles.Ted Seto offered excellent comments in which he showed, to my surprise, that I am not at the most pessimistic end of the spectrum concerning where U...
JCT Tax Expenditure estimates
Posted on November 10, 2008I've commented in the past on the great work that's been going on at the Joint Committee on Taxation seeking to improve the usefulness of the tax expenditure concept by wresting it free of the irrelevant side-debate with which it was long intertwined concerning efforts to define a "normal" tax base...
Stanford Law School conference on the tax gap
Posted on November 10, 2008This past Saturday I was a commentator, at the Stanford Law School's tax gap conference, on a paper by Joe Bankman, Stuart Karlinsky, and Susan Morse concerning why cash businesses cheat (based on field interviews with people who spoke freely because it was confidential)...
Audacious stunt by the Treasury Department
Posted on November 10, 2008Today's Washington Post reveals a truly audacious stunt that the Treasury Department pulled in late September, essentially repealing on its own motion Code section 382 as applied to banks. The ruling through which it did this is available here, and it appears to be aptly described as flat-out repeal of the provision so far as banks are concerned...
Go West, young (?) man
Posted on November 07, 2008Later today I'm headed to California, where I will first, on Saturday, comment at a Tax Gap conference on a paper by Joe Bankman, Stu Karlinsky, and Susan Morse concerning cash businesses. Then, on Monday, I will go to Loyola Los Angeles and present my paper (from the GWU conference that I blogged recently here) concerning the long-term U...
Election Day
Posted on November 04, 2008I got to the polling place at 6:25 AM - lines around the block, hundreds of people, I've never seen anything close on Election Day even more towards prime time. But the line moved well, and in 35 minutes I was done.The guy behind me on line was saying he hadn't voted since Perot...
Obama wins
Posted on November 04, 2008Eight years of unrelieved ugliness are almost over.Perhaps the most important thing, in the long run, is that the Republicans return to sanity so that we have two reasonably responsible parties, as any well-functioning democracy needs. They have been stark raving mad for 14 years now, relentlessly undermining civil society and seeking to destroy honest public discourse along with the rule of law...
The flat tax isn't flat
Posted on November 03, 2008Freddie, a thoughtful conservative blogger not previously known to me but linked by Andrew Sullivan, says the following about McCain's "socialism" attack:"I think we could have an election that involves a major debate about the progressive income tax, but in order to have it, we'd have to have a candidate who is actually opposed to progressive taxation...
Nate, don't fail me now
Posted on November 03, 2008On Election Eve, Silver at fivethirtyeight.com has it up to 98.1 percent.This will make it easier to sleep tonight.I'm planning to vote by 6:30 a.m., but just the once.
Economist Christine Romer on fiscal policy
Posted on November 02, 2008From an interview (along with her husband David Romer) in a Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis publication, the Region:"What's very striking is that we had a pretty sensible long-run fiscal view in the 1950s - the budget should be balanced over the medium run, but not each and every year and not in exceptional circumstances ...
Income inequality vs. consumption inequality
Posted on October 31, 2008A post today by Kevin Drum reminded me of an issue that arose in the media a few months back that I've meant to address. Some economists (I gather mainly conservative ones) argue that focusing on income inequality is misguided. Thus, according to Michael Cox and Richard Alm some months back:"Looking at a far more direct measure of American families? economic status ? household consumption ? indicates that the gap between rich and poor is far less than most assume, and that the abstract, income-based way in which we measure the so-called poverty rate no longer applies to our society...
Baseball idea
Posted on October 29, 2008There should be a rule, solely for the post-season, that games are never treated either as rained out before they have become official, or as terminated short of 9 innings, on account of weather. Rather, they would in all cases be suspended and resumed where they left off at the next opportunity...
Douglas Holtz-Eakin disgraces himself yet again
Posted on October 27, 2008I am really starting to wonder about Doug. Doesn't he plan to spend his life after the election - at least assuming McCain loses - in some sort of academic or intellectual setting? Does he have any inner compass of integrity left whatsoever? Are they drugging his food?The McCain campaign has dredged up an Obama quote from 2001 that is today's new attack point...
McCain explains his tax position
Posted on October 26, 2008McCain keeps saying, so far as I can make any sense of it, that asking higher-income people to pay more tax than others is "socialist." Thus, he appears to be advocating a uniform head tax as the only alternative to "socialism," though needless to say he declines to make this explicit...
GWU Law School conference on generational equity
Posted on October 24, 2008Yesterday I attended the first half of a conference at GWU Law School in Washington, D.C., organized by Neil Buchanan, concerning generational equity. 5 panels: philosophical perspectives, government finance (my panel, obviously), environmental, reproductive rights, "living constitution...
"Socialism"
Posted on October 22, 2008I seem to be having Internet problems. I can't download, or even find any reference to, the McCain proposal to replace the income tax with a uniform head tax. Yet he must be planning to announce this, given his newfound aversion to "socialism."
THE big news story of the day
Posted on October 22, 2008Working out in the health club this morning, I could see (from screens tuned to CNN and even Fox) that the big news story of the day, hands down, is Palin's $150,000 clothing budget from the RNC.It is of course comical that a story like this should be so prominent, or should matter at all...
Jon Stewart's Daily Show
Posted on October 21, 2008I actually got to attend a taping today, courtesy of a friend from out of the country who had an extra ticket (requested months in advance). I must say, McCain continues to give these guys great material, day after day, since almost any scurrilous or silly thing he says comes with ready videotape of a complete contradiction...
Fiscal stimulus and the budget deficit / fiscal gap
Posted on October 21, 2008Paul Krugman is among those mocking the idea that we need to worry about the long-term fiscal situation given the risk of severe recession and the need for fiscal not just monetary policy to address it.Okay, I'm on board for fiscal stimulus this time around, although I don't like it in general because I think politicians tend to misuse it in other circumstances as an excuse for whatever they happen to want to do (e...
Budget policy next year if Obama wins
Posted on October 15, 2008Jason Furman is apparently telling budget hawk Congressional Democrats that Obama would seek to establish "a government unified around the concept of fiscal discipline and centered around the pay-go rule. Insisting on paying for things will lead to better economic policy...
Paul Krugman wins the Nobel Economics Prize
Posted on October 13, 2008Interesting to have this happen now; I have no idea whether the Nobel committee cares about Krugman's public intellectual role. He's obviously a meritorious pick in any event for his economics work, which reflected a trajectory from (a) challenging the conventional wisdom, such as about international trade, to show that things were a bit more complicated and ambiguous, to (b) defending the conventional wisdom against rejections of it that were ignorant and overstated...
Budget deficit update
Posted on October 10, 2008According to Martin Sullivan in the 10/6/08 Tax Notes, the budget deficit for 2009 could end up as high as $914 billion, or 6.2% of GDP, both of which would be all-time national records. This would reflect scoring the financial rescue plan on what seems the correct basis, if it can be done sufficiently accurately, which is to treat only the excess of outlays over the estimated present value of future receipts as a write-off...
Doug Holtz-Eakin, your thesis advisor is calling
Posted on October 09, 2008His latest public statement was to the effect that Obama opposes the new McCain bailout plan because Obama just wants to help Wall Street, not Main Street.Doug, did anyone tell you that the McCain plan is a direct pay to Wall Street, giving them face value rather than just market value for bad mortgages? Indeed, isn't it partly your plan? (I'd assume you helped draft it...
Staying calm in tough times
Posted on October 09, 2008What do you tell yourself when, by market measures, your net worth declines by, say, a couple of hundred thousand dollars in the course of a week? (I haven't checked, but for someone my age with retirement saving it's a fair guess.)I tell myself that all that's really changed is the median prediction for the future by a bunch of over-excitable folks who are playing Keynes' famous beauty contest game (trying to figure out who everyone else will think everyone else thinks is the winner)...
The time I met John McCain
Posted on October 06, 2008Okay, I haven't told this story here yet. It was 1999. I had a book coming out soon on Social Security. Someone at NYU who handles press relations told me that Good Morning America was going to have John McCain stop by to discuss Social Security privatization (this being before that term was forbidden), and if I came I could ask him a question...
IRS Chief Counsel Donald Korb steps down
Posted on October 03, 2008Courtesy of the Tax Prof blog, I gather that IRS Chief Counsel Don Korb has stepped down effective no later than next January 19, so that the next Administration can start right out with his successor.This is not a surprise, since no one would be expected to want to stay in the Chief Counsel job forever...
VP debate - not the comment readers might expect
Posted on October 02, 2008I really can't watch these things straight through - too tedious and stupid an experience for me.But I would give a lot of money to put an end to the faux populism that resonates everywhere in American politics. All these durn "regular folks" who want your vote while pretending they have no money and aren't famous & powerful...
There's a time and a place for lying
Posted on October 01, 2008One of the hassles of my line of work is being asked frequently to write tenure and promotion letters. This can be a slog even when the bottom line is clear (as it usually is - tenure in law schools is much closer to automatic than, say, in leading economics departments)...
A nice heap of sugar
Posted on October 01, 2008The Senate passed the bailout bill tonight after sweetening it with $150 billion ($110 billion net of offsets) in new tax breaks, including "extenders" that no doubt will soon be extended again. The bill, originally just 3 pages (although that gave the Treasury excessive authority without oversight), now apparently exceeds 450 pages...
Campaigns as a political institution
Posted on September 25, 2008Presidential campaigns are supposed to provide information so people can make intelligent choices. Partly from the candidates' announced intentions, and the rest from what we can discern about character, temperament, and intellect.I've had my doubts sometimes about how well campaigns work, in an age of over-the-top media manipulation and contrived narratives, to do what they are supposed to...
2009 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium
Posted on September 25, 2008It's never too soon. In that spirit, here is the schedule for the 2009 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, which I will be co-teaching with Alan Auerbach:SCHEDULE FOR 2009 NYU TAX POLICY COLLOQUIUM(All sessions meet on Thursdays from 4-6 pm in Furman 120, NYU Law School) 1...
Case study in how bitter political fights destroy social capital
Posted on September 24, 2008I've been thinking a lot lately about Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, which I read and enjoyed while on vacation this summer. While much of it is about the eponymous Trickster, a perennial favorite topic of mine, it's really mainly about a broader trend in our society that Nixon was brilliant and innovative at exploiting but that really goes way beyond his direct influence (i...
Country last
Posted on September 24, 2008It's amusing that McCain apparently wants to avoid voting on the bailout, but is eager to have Democrats provide the votes to pass it so that he can then safely grandstand as the noble naysayer. (Details here.)Having been shamed into a press conference, he's quoted as follows:"This issue should be - and their vote should be determined in how we can resolve this crisis and get America going again," McCain said...
Good day
Posted on September 23, 2008My cold or allergies receded, I was productive and am close to finishing my paper on generational equity/efficiency/political economy and the fiscal gap, the expanded Pavement reissue of Brighten the Corners was announced for mid-November, the Mets won while the Yankees were eliminated, and Paulson got some of the tough questioning that he deserves.
Could the bailout actually make money for the Treasury?
Posted on September 23, 2008Republican Senator Norman Coleman apparently is arguing that it could.Theoretically speaking, Coleman actually is potentially right. The deleveraging theory that I've mentioned in earlier posts suggests that assets may end up having market values well below fundamental value in a temporary squeeze where there simply isn't enough money on the "long" side to compete away the windfalls suggested by the spread...
The Paulson Catch-22
Posted on September 22, 2008While Paulson is generally well-regarded, we don't really know a great deal about him as a public official. From that standpoint, his demanding a close to zero-oversight blank check grant of authority, followed by his calling for a "clean" bill to forestall, not Congressional pork barrel attachments but meaningful oversight, is not encouraging...
More on the bailout plan
Posted on September 21, 2008Imagine that it's January 2009, and that Treasury Secretary Phil Gramm has $700 billion to dole out as he likes to Wall Street companies claiming distress. Phrases that occur to me include Teapot Dome (or perhaps I should say Iraq reconstruction), crony capitalism, and great Republican Party fundraising tool...
Understatement of the day
Posted on September 21, 2008From Peter Goodman, "But Will It Work?" in today's NY Times, page A-1:"Some question the prudence of adding [$700 billion] to the nation?s overall debt at a time when the Treasury relies on the largess of foreigners to cover the bills."The best argument in favor of being so reckless is not an edifying one...
Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bailouts (according to Paulson)
Posted on September 19, 2008Absolutely no need to finance it, of course.
Subsidizing the Yankees
Posted on September 18, 2008A House sub-committee is holding hearings today on alleged improprieties in the use of tax-exempt bond financing to pay for the new Yankee Stadium. Not to put too fine a point on it, but highly questionable representations concerning site value seem to have been made in the IRS private letter ruling request, which found the financing eligible for tax-exempt treatment without its being subject to the dollar cap on issuance of private activity bonds...
War with Spain?
Posted on September 18, 2008Sorry guys, but you're going to have to wait your turn in line. After Iran, Russia, China, Syria, and North Korea, we will see what we can do.
Accounting rules and the financial meltdown
Posted on September 18, 2008Today's WSJ had an interesting, albeit not very clearly written, op-ed by Zachary Karabell blaming post-Enron accounting rules for helping create the AIG meltdown. Read in conjunction with the WSJ's front-page coverage of the AIG drama as a case study in "deleveraging," the story appears to be as follows...
The AIG rescue
Posted on September 17, 2008It may well have been the right decision, all things considered, but I must say I really don't like it. The obvious points are moral hazard plus the question of exactly what the government is going to do with the new asset in its portfolio.Interesting point about this is that the decision was presumably made by Bernanke and Paulson...
Behind the market meltdown
Posted on September 16, 2008Why are these things happening on Wall Street, and what can we learn from them?Legal and economic scholarship concerning markets and regulation are actually in the ballpark of understanding this, if not of developing bulletproof answers. During my early years in the legal academy (which I entered in 1987), market-based, anti-regulatory law and economics was sweeping all before it - on merit, based on the insights it was advancing and the defects in prior ways of thinking about the issues...
Call me crazy but ...
Posted on September 15, 2008... I've pretty much decided to stop following the 2008 presidential campaign. My sentiments are the same as previously, and I will of course vote. But I am simply finding it too infuriating and distressing; I could use stronger words if I wanted to get back in the mood...
Fall of the titans
Posted on September 15, 2008Lehman Brothers apparently was founded in 1850, and Merrill Lynch in 1914. The fall of these two titans - though Merrill Lynch is merely being sold, not liquidated - truly is an epochal event, symbolizing how high the metaphorical flood waters, no less than the literal ones in various hurricane zones, are rising these days.
Something about McCain that I've been wondering about lately
Posted on September 13, 2008Let's see: he's been violent in public, and he's called his wife a "c---" in public. What sort of behavior in private does that fit the profile for?
Campaign / budget update from the Tax Policy Center
Posted on September 13, 2008According to the widely respected Tax Policy Center, analyzing the candidates' campaign platforms:"The simple bottom line: under Senator Obama?s tax plan as described by his campaign advisors, the ten-year federal deficit (before spending cuts) would total nearly $5...
Krugman gets it 99 percent right
Posted on September 12, 2008From his column today on the presidential campaign:"T]he deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts...
Out-of-print album watch
Posted on September 11, 2008First Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue came back into print a couple of months ago - a great and very sad listen (if rather 70s) that is packaged with the equally good aborted follow-up, Bambu.On Tuesday, Tom Verlaine's Dreamtime is coming back into print, his second solo album after the (initial) break-up of Television...
Ten good things about John McCain
Posted on September 11, 2008I've been a bit harsh on him at times, but here are 10 GOOD things about John McCain, the best I could think of:1) He performed up to his ability in military school.2) He never lies when his lips aren't moving.3) He's been right, at one time or another, about most major domestic policy issues (since he's taken both sides)...
Rosanne Altshuler becomes co-director of the Tax Policy Center
Posted on September 11, 2008The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center just announced that, starting in January, Rosanne Altshuler will become its co-director, joining Len Burman and Bill Gale. This is great news on many levels. Rosanne, one of the best international tax economists in the country, is an incredibly thoughtful, careful, and creative scholar who has made important contributions and is at the forefront of thinking seriously and fair-mindedly (not a universal trait) about where U...
9/11
Posted on September 11, 2008Being in downtown NYC, I saw the whole thing happen and then lived through the crazy days that came after it. I will never forget the shock, rage, and fear of that period.But by its seventh anniversary there's an even more hateful overlay. Now, 9/11 invokes in my memory above all:1) "All right, you've covered your ass...
When will the U.S. default?
Posted on September 08, 2008For my current work in progress, "The Long-Term U.S. Fiscal Gap: Is the Main Problem Generational Inequity?," I recently took a look at the question of how fast, under current budget scenarios, the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio would explode. The sequence is potentially interesting because capital markets, in determining when U...
Open empirical question
Posted on September 07, 2008Brendan Nyhan suggests that liberal blogger Josh Marshall is guilty of a "smear" when he compares Guiliani's speech at the recently concluded RNC convention to a speech by Josef Goebbels. Nyhan notes that "casual Nazi analogies demean and cheapen the discourse -- it's an easy way to active a series of unflattering associations and attach them to a public figure that you don't like...
Siberia sounds toasty by comparison
Posted on September 03, 2008I gather from a Michael Isikoff blog on the Newsweek site that Doug Holtz-Eakin has been posted from the McCain campaign over to Sarah Palin as director of her domestic policy operation (such as it is).Wow - what a reward to Doug for having endangered his (previously justifiably high) reputation for all these months by carrying water for the campaign's wildly irresponsible tax and budget policies.
New wine in old bottles
Posted on September 03, 2008I find the newly released Byrne-Eno album quite charming, even delightful, but am going to pass on the new Brian Wilson (odds seem high against its actually being much good).
Call me old-fashioned, but ...
Posted on September 02, 2008.. while I think chest-beating invocations of patriotism can be over-done, I still have this crazy belief that elected U.S. national leaders should be, well, pro-U.S., rather than Alaskan nationalists.
Changing seasons
Posted on August 28, 2008The signs are everywhere. Fresh apricots are no longer available at the local farmers' markets. The weather is less hot and more comfortable - a fact that is nonetheless dispiriting (though not as much as the departed apricots) because one knows where it is headed...
Back in NYC
Posted on August 24, 2008I spent the last few days at an academic conference in Woodstock, VT. Best way to describe the local ambience is to note that even a gas station convenience store had microbrewery wheat beers and fresh whole-grain breads from a local gourmet bakery. I forgot to check for the whimsically named local brand of fresh dark-roasted whole coffee beans, but maybe it was behind the chai.
Big thought for the day
Posted on August 21, 2008Getting older is like managing the retreat of an Army unit. You know you have to give ground and will eventually lose everything. But in the meantime you want to retreat as slowly as possible, keeping it orderly and preventing a rout. Anywhere you can stand and fight for a while you should if the odds are good enough...
Krugman on the U.S. corporate tax rate
Posted on August 18, 2008There's been a lot of focus in tax policy circles on the contention that the U.S. corporate rate is too high, leading to one or more of the following claimed ill effects: (1) competitive disadvantage to U.S. companies abroad (which might or might not affect U...
If John McCain had written John Lennon's songs
Posted on August 15, 2008"All we are saying is give war a chance.""War is the answerYou've gotta let it, you've gotta let it grow.""War is real, real is warWar is feeling, feeling warWar is wanting to make war.""Peace is over, if you want itPeace is over now."
Guiltier pleasures
Posted on August 14, 2008OK, I admit it. I have been watching and enjoying Project Runway lately. It's especially helpful when I need to get through a bunch of exercises designed to prevent recurrence of any of the six main injuries that have cost me substantial tennis-playing time in recent years...
Tempest in a teapot
Posted on August 14, 2008Speaker Pelosi is saying that the GAO report that came out this week, indicating that two-thirds of all U.S. corporations pay no tax at all, "highlights the need to revisit tax reform to ensure that U.S. companies pay their fair share of taxes."Now, I certainly agree about the need for tax reform, and for addressing corporate-level tax avoidance, but not based on the GAO report, which was truly a non-event...
Furman and Goolsbee on Obama's and McCain's tax and budget policies
Posted on August 14, 2008In today's WSJ, lead Obama economists Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee continue to use the Bush budget baseline (for reasons I understand but regret).As readers can tell from my past posts, I disagree with plenty of what Obama is proposing, partly though not wholly because I have the luxury of not running a contested political campaign...
McCain betting odds
Posted on August 12, 2008In light of the ignorant bellicosity that he's once again trumpeted in the face of the Georgia crisis (see here), I'd posit the following, if he becomes president:--Over/under for the likely average number of wars we'll be engaged in at any given time during his presidency: 2...
The state we're in
Posted on August 12, 2008The Washington Post has an article today entitled "Obama Tax Plan Would Balloon Deficit, Analysis Finds."The key point: while Obama (with indisputable accuracy) denounces Bush's "reckless" economic policies that are "mortgaging our children's future on a mountain of debt," he is himself proposing tax changes that would add $3...
Right charge, wrong example
Posted on August 04, 2008Obama is running an ad attacking McCain for proposing a $4 billion tax break for oil companies right when their profits are way up, and noting that McCain has just gotten $2 million in oil company executive campaign contributions.I gather the $4 billion is computed simply by applying to the oil companies McCain's proposal to lower the corporate tax rate to 25 percent...
David Gergen says the obvious
Posted on August 03, 2008Gergen, not exactly a radical leftist, apparently said on TV this weekend: "When McCain's camp calls Obama "The Messiah" and "The One", he's really calling him "uppity." I'm from the South, and we understand what that means. That's code."I'm not from the South and yet it's been totally obvious to me...
Like Scottie in Hitchcock's Vertigo
Posted on July 31, 2008That's a bit how I feel watching it happen yet again - the quadrennial attack on the Democratic presidential candidate as "elitist" and "out of touch," launched by Rove & his disciples on behalf of an arrogant multi-millionaire who wants to play War Emperor while handing huge and unsustainable tax breaks to very rich people...
The bogus tax-spending distinction strikes again
Posted on July 30, 2008While McCain tours the land insisting that Obama plans to raise taxes, his chief economic advisor (leaving aside the buffoonish Phil Gramm), Doug Holtz-Eakin, has admitted publicly that Obama actually plans to cut taxes on balance. Details here.The ground for finding a net tax cut is that Obama's healthcare package would make heavy use of targeted tax benefits to increase insurance coverage and the like...
The actual 2009 budget deficit may exceed $900 billion
Posted on July 29, 2008Despite my discomfort with using the annual budget deficit as a measure of long-term fiscal problems, I feel the need to say a bit more about the bogus $482 billion number that the Bush Administration has succeeded (through dishonest accounting) in putting into all the headlines...
Record budget deficit
Posted on July 28, 2008Bush Administration officials now say this year's budget deficit will set an all-time record by standing at $490 billion, as compared to the budget surplus of $128 billion that Bush inherited.News media are using the $490 billion number even though it apparently excludes $80 billion of Iraq and Afghanistan war spending...
No comment necessary
Posted on July 27, 2008McCain, on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, explaining why, contrary to what all the economists say, a gas tax holiday would be passed on to consumers after all:McCain: ... we wouldn't let it happen. We wouldn't let it happen. Americans wouldn't let them absorb that...
No new stimulus bill?
Posted on July 21, 2008Budget expert Stan Collender predicts that there will be no new stimulus bill this year, despite politicians' anxiety about being blamed by voters for the continuing economic slowdown, on the very shrewd ground that pursuing further fiscal stimulus might not quite make sense right now either for the Republicans or the Democrats...
Rewrite hell
Posted on July 20, 2008The heading of this post is a great overstatement, but I do indeed find myself working these days on revisions to forthcoming publications rather than new work. I have minor revisions to make (but they can still take a bit of time) both to my tax & accounting article that is forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Journal, and to my forthcoming Urban Institute Press book, "The Corporate Tax: What Is It, and Where Is It Headed?"David Bradford once said that, if you polish a forthcoming piece to the point of perfection, that proves you have misallocated your time, since the marginal value of the last increments of improvement are surely less than the marginal value you could have created by doing something creative and new...
Is McCain really the author of the "surge"?
Posted on July 20, 2008In a word, no. During the pre-surge years, his subsequent mythmaking nowithstanding, he spent at least 80 percent of the time totally supporting Bush and Rumsfeld and saying that the war was going great. He supported the surge when it came due to a simple kneejerk rule that he follows at all times: among all the politically credible options that are on the table in U...
McCain supports longer gas tax holiday!
Posted on July 18, 2008Yes, three months is no longer enough, and he now wants to make the gas tax holiday longer.I still don't think he's going far enough. Why not propose generous gas subsidies? Or at least financial rewards for owning a gas guzzler, since he specifically emphasizes the plight of "low income Americans that [sic] are driving the oldest automobiles...
Next stop, Sundance?
Posted on July 18, 2008I just finished taping a couple of hours with some documentary filmmakers who are bravely preparing a feature on tax reform and the problems with the tax system. They hope to have their film in distribution later this year. It's to be called "An Inconvenient Tax," and you can find out more about it here and here.
Bruce Bartlett on McCain vs. Obama
Posted on July 17, 2008Bruce Bartlett, a leading conservative critic of contemporary Republicans who have hijacked and besmirched the conservative label, argues on the following grounds that McCain's and Obama's tax policies would be less different than one might think. To preview my response, it would be a better world if Bruce were right in his predictions about what they would do but I'm not convinced that he is right...
Last stand in Vietnam
Posted on July 12, 2008It's Saturday night here (11 hours later than in NYC), and on Monday morning we start our very long journey back to the States, expecting to be back mid-day on Tuesday (although to our bodies it will be late Tuesday night).Here are a couple of shots of our Hoi An resort, where we've been spending a pleasant and relaxing last week after the more energetic touring of our earlier days in Vietnam.
More on McCain's "disgrace" comment about Social Security
Posted on July 11, 2008Fungibility notwithstanding, obviously it would be absurd at this point to deem Social Security's payroll tax revenues as available for any other purpose, such as funding current workers' future benefits, unless one made it a true break-even by treating some other set of equivalent or greater revenues as off the table instead...
Semantic disgrace?
Posted on July 09, 2008McCain has been drawing heat from the liberal blogosphere for calling Social Security an "absolute disgrace" by reason of the fact that young workers' taxes are used to pay seniors' benefits. They rightly note that he is criticizing a core feature of the program since its inception, thereby suggesting that he is at odds with what remains an exceptionally popular set of policies...
Sapa, Vietnam
Posted on July 07, 2008After a couple of days trekking in Sapa (mountains in northwestern Vietnam, right by China), we have arrived at the Hoi An resort near Danang in southern Vietnam for our final leg out here. Sapa is striking and beautiful, though easiest to get to if you are short (the night train can be a bit cramped for the taller among us).
A new low
Posted on July 07, 2008John "100 Years" McCain's claim that he will balance the budget by winning the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (permitting outlays in both countries to go to zero?) deserves some sort of gold medal for ludicrousness and audacity. I assume they were laughing as they formulated this one over in campaign central...
Mysteries of the U.S. presidential campaign
Posted on July 02, 2008When you are abroad during a U.S. presidential campaign, even with Internet access most of the time, the stuff that is going on back home can seem a bit mysterious once one catches up with it.Back in 2004, I spent the big Swift-boating month teaching and vacationing in Australia...
Halong Bay
Posted on July 02, 2008A 3-hour drive from Hanoi brought us to Halong Bay, where we stayed for two nights on a reasonably luxurious boat and went kayaking through limestone caves, climbing small hills on the islands, and swimming in the warmth of the bay (off the Gulf of Tonkin)...
McCain's flight suit
Posted on June 29, 2008This apparently is it, courtesy of the Hoa La Prison in Hanoi (aka the Hanoi Hilton), which is now a museum. I'll admit to feeling a twinge of sympathy for the guy when I saw it, although it's my personal feeling that, in his late-career desperation (last chance for the brass ring and all that), McCain - much like Hubert Humphrey in 1972, for those whose memories go back that far - has definitively thrown his integrity in the trash.
End of class in Singapore
Posted on June 27, 2008Week 2 of my 2-week Tax Policy stint in Singapore went pretty well. Though I was trying to explain fairly advanced ideas to people who had variable backgrounds in tax law and public economics, with time things kept getting better and it ended up being a good experience on both sides (I think)...
Random notes from one week plus in Singapore
Posted on June 22, 2008Lectures would be going well except I am being over-ambitious (good students but they know less about tax than my usual in NYU) and I find myself running out of time each day. Adjustments in the second week should take care of the worst of it.When on Arab Street, visitors to Singapore should seek out Cafe Zam Zam but avoid Cafe Le Caire (distressingly mediocre for its venue)...
Feeding the sting rays
Posted on June 17, 2008The Underwater World Aquarium at Sentosa Island in Singapore has a petting tank with tame juvenile sting rays (de-barbed to prevent Steve Irwin replays) that you can feed little bits of squid that you purchase for this purpose. The sting rays are delicate in grabbing the squid without gnawing your hand, an important detail that this picture (showing my arm) may not make clear...
The 2008 presidential campaign and the fiscal gap
Posted on June 15, 2008From the Tax Policy Center:"Although both candidates have at times stressed fiscal responsibility, their specific non-health tax proposals would reduce tax revenues by $3.7 trillion (McCain) and $2.7 trillion (Obama) over the next 10 years, or approximately 10 and 7 percent of the revenues scheduled for collection under current law, respectively...
Singapore in a nutshell
Posted on June 15, 2008I was walking down the street yesterday, and saw a woman walking her dog. Not only did she clean up the dog's mess, but she wiped the dog's bottom afterwards, much as one might with a baby.Meanwhile, a shot of a performing contortionist in Chinatown.
Scalia flunks History 101
Posted on June 15, 2008From his dissent in the Boumediene case: ?The game of bait-and-switch that today?s opinion plays upon the Nation?s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us.?The president is not ?the Nation?s Commander in Chief.? He is the commander in chief of the armed forces...
Just before we landed
Posted on June 13, 2008Photo courtesy of my wife. After severe jet lag on Day 1 (too exhausted at 7 pm to read a book or even watch Curb Your Enthusiasm without keeling over), we're feeling better today.
Off to Singapore
Posted on June 10, 2008I leave in a couple of hours for JFK Airport, flying to Singapore to teach Tax Policy over 2 weeks at the NYU@NUS program. The topics for the 8 classes are (1) public economics, (2) horizontal equity [and lots of related stuff], (3) vertical equity, (4) income versus consumption taxation, (5) corporate taxation, (6) corporate tax shelters, (7) international taxation, and (8) deficits and long-term budgeting...
Gas tax, the sequel
Posted on June 09, 2008For McCain, raising the gas tax issue again may verge on being a forced move. With gas prices up and the stock market down, and with Obama pounding him on the economy and his lack of non-Bush ideas, I don't see where else McCain can go.This time, the pushback against the gas tax holiday should emphasize more the point that it is unlikely to lower gas prices at the pump, hence it is actually a disguised giveaway to the oil companies rather than a sop to consumers...
Jason Furman named top economic adviser to the Obama campaign
Posted on June 09, 2008I count this as very good news, not just because I know Jason but because he has, in my experience over quite a few years, been consistently fair-minded and intellectually honest, even when he took shots for this (an example being the Walmart dust-up a couple of years back)...
Vacation reading
Posted on June 09, 2008I wouldn't entirely call it a vacation, given that I will be doing 28 hours of teaching in Singapore over 8 days, but I'll nonetheless be loaded with vacation reading when I hit the airport tomorrow night. Unless I drop one to save weight, I'll have:1) Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties [for the airplane on the way out],2) Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 [Iraq War avant la lettre],3) Joe Keenan, My Lucky Star [supposed to be a Wodehousean Hollywood novel],4) Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy [not your typical beach read, but highly recommended here & there],5) Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle [spouse-recommended memoir],6) Rick Perlstein, Nixonland [hope it's not too depressing and is analytical not too shrill],The weight of these is enough to make one think wistfully about the Amazon Kindle...
Yes, economists can teach at law schools, but not constitutional law
Posted on June 06, 2008Doug Holtz-Eakin appears to be branching out a bit from his earlier public economics insights as a McCain adviser, such as in his statements that replacing depreciation with expensing has zero revenue cost and that you can pay for $5.7 trillion in tax cuts over ten years by cutting targeted tax benefits that amount to $30 billion per year...
What a kidder
Posted on June 04, 2008McCain warned yesterday that Obama's policies would create chaos in the Middle East.Next up, Isiah Thomas warns that Walsh and D'Antoni will make the Knicks a loser.
Summer academic writing
Posted on June 04, 2008Although my month in Singapore and Vietnam looms, I have begun the first of what I hope will be two articles this summer (probably extending into the fall). Working title: "The Long-Term U.S. Fiscal Gap: Is the Main Problem Generational Inequity?"Short answer: no, since it is so hard to specify the optimal generational policy...
Without a cellphone (!!)
Posted on June 03, 2008I feel as if I have left the 21st century and plunged back into the earlier dark ages. My cellphone broke after many years, and rather than buy a new one (or commit to a two-year plan so I could get one for free) I've decided to get an iPhone.But what with the pervasive rumors that the new generation iPhone will be out as soon as next week, along with the fact that I am about to leave the country for a month (Singapore followed by Vietnam) and thus couldn't use a cellphone without hefty roaming charges anyway, I decided just to cancel my prior service and sit tight, waiting for July...
Mankiw versus DeLong
Posted on June 02, 2008In Sunday's NY Times, Greg Mankiw had a column calling for a cut in the U.S. corporate tax rate. as per McCain's campaign platform, but with the important difference that Mankiw wants to finance it (assuming it's not providentially in Laffer territory) by increasing the gas tax...
Reverse spin?
Posted on June 02, 2008The noise machine message about Scott McClellan's memoir is that he sounds like a left-wing blogger (Karl Rove when it first hit the papers), or that it sounds like a Democrat wrote it (Robert Novak in today's Washington Post).Another way of saying the same thing would be that a Bush insider has written a memoir confirming the accuracy of the Democrats' and left-wing bloggers' view of the Bush Administration.
Is there anything McCain actually DOES know about Iraq?
Posted on May 30, 2008I'm trying to avoid political rants outside my main areas of professional knowledge, but I am really starting to wonder about the old duffer.We've already seen (from several statements) that he doesn't appear to know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites...
Ferdinand the Bull
Posted on May 27, 2008Many of those with young (or formerly young) children will remember the delightful children's tale of Ferdinand the Bull, who looked fierce but was useless for bullfighting because he just wanted to lie around sniffing the flowers. I was reminded of him by Shadow, our senior cat, when we were out at the country this weekend...
Huge sigh of relief
Posted on May 20, 2008With three weeks to spare before I head to Singapore for two weeks of teaching followed by two weeks of touring in Vietnam (mainly Sapa, Halong Bay, and Hoi An), I have finished a first draft of my forthcoming book for the Urban Institute Press, The U...
Press interview
Posted on May 20, 2008I was interviewed earlier today by a reporter for an on-line financial publication concerning my proposal for partial adjustment of publicly traded companies' taxable income towards their financial accounting income. He had gotten the lead from my talk to the National Tax Association the other day...
Optimal income taxation and the NBA draft lottery
Posted on May 20, 2008This evening's NBA draft lottery reminds me that the lottery is a redistributive instrument balancing efficiency against distributive goals in much the same manner as the optimal income tax (OIT) in the public economics literature pioneered by Nobel economist James Mirrlees...
National Tax Assocation session in Washington
Posted on May 16, 2008Yesterday I presented my tax and accounting paper at the NTA?s annual spring meeting in Washington. This involved racing through my perhaps 30 minutes worth of Power Point slides in only 20 minutes (I didn?t have time to shorten them). Lillian Mills of the University of Texas was my commentator...
Oops, rounding error
Posted on May 14, 2008Stan Collender reminds us that Bush in 2000 promised to eliminate the national debt by the end of this decade. Instead, it is more than $9.3 trillion and rising by $1.59 billion per day.On a par with his other achievements.
Joint Committee on Taxation addresses tax expenditure analysis
Posted on May 14, 2008This past Monday, the JCT issued a pamphlet taking on an important conceptual issue, tax expenditure analysis, and making what I think are significant strides in how to rescue the analysis, and its important informational content, from sterile debates about what constitutes a "normal" tax base...
Release of candidates' spouses' tax returns
Posted on May 08, 2008Cindy McCain is refusing to release her separately-filed tax returns as part of the disclosure process generally demanded in a Presidential campaign. In 2004, Teresa Heinz Kerry similarly refused to release her returns for most of the campaign, although on October 16 of that year she released the front two pages of her 2003 tax return...
Hillary's next move
Posted on May 05, 2008She is truly emerging as one of Wellesley's and Yale Law School's great "anti-elitists." I'm expecting her to denounce the theory of evolution any day now. If the U.S. had more Islamic than anti-Islamic voters, no doubt she would call for restoring the veil...
Back from Israel
Posted on May 05, 2008I am back from a very pleasant week in Israel, jet-lagged after a 6 hour plane delay that kept me in the Ben Gurion Airport from 9 pm to 5:30 am, but more or less functioning.More on this in a day or so.
Drinking the kool-aid
Posted on April 25, 2008The McCain campaign has been arguing that their proposal to allow companies to expense equipment purchases in the first year of use would come at no added budgetary cost. See, for example, here.I am told that Doug Holtz-Eakin has been making this argument to reporters and at various public forums...
Final NYU Tax Policy Colloquium of 2008
Posted on April 24, 2008Today Jason Furman presented a paper on healthcare, rightly (I'd say) lambasting the bizarre Cogan-Hubbard-Kessler plan to combat moral hazard in healthcare by increasing it, and proposing his own plan which is hardly bullet-proof (and presumably unenactable) yet has some clear virtues...
Free gas for everyone throughout the Labor Day weekend!!
Posted on April 22, 2008Now that Hillary Clinton has jumped on the McCain bandwagon with regard to suspending the gasoline tax, I think it's time to up the ante.Why stop at merely eliminating the tax? Zero is so arbitrary as a floor. We could get even more financial relief to Americans during the vacation season, and even more fiscal stimulus, by adopting a gasoline subsidy...
Heads up for Tax Notes readers
Posted on April 21, 2008My Senate Finance testimony from last Tuesday (April 15) appeared today in print at 119 Tax Notes 313 (April 21, 2008). Non-subscribers can still read my testimony here.
Where did the shame go?
Posted on April 20, 2008I've always respected economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who is McCain's top economics adviser other than the public faces whom I fervently hope are just window-dressing, such as Phil Gramm and Jack Kemp. Holtz-Eakin is almost the only academic or policy intellectual (apart from Jack Goldsmith) to have a prominent Republican-appointed job in George W...
Another new publication
Posted on April 17, 2008Yet another article that I wrote for a conference a couple of years ago is now on the verge of coming out. In "Simplifying Assumptions: How Might the Politics of Consumption Tax Reform Affect (Impair) the End Product?" I try to examine the political economy scenarios that would be necessary for a consumption tax to be enacted replacing the current income tax...
NYU Tax Policy Colloquium on David Gamage's Optimal Tax Theory Meets Tax Avoidance
Posted on April 17, 2008I guess I've been doing these colloquium sessions for long enough now that, at some level of generality, nearly everything I encounter has happened before. The genre for today's session, which happens at least every other year or so (maybe more), was being initially really irked by a paper, leading to skirmishing at lunch (today, including eye-rolling by all 3 of us), followed by a turn for the better after hammering it out...
The real tax policy significance of Paris Hilton
Posted on April 16, 2008Having seen her on one of the big TV screens in the health club when I was working out this morning, I'm reminded of how I think her symbolic significance to tax policy debates is sometimes (to my taste at least) misstated.Proponents of estate or inheritance taxation sometimes see her as the poster child for their position in the debate...
Another musical note
Posted on April 16, 2008Some time ago I purchased CD 1 of the 3-CD "69 Love Songs" by the Magnetic Fields (aka NYC songwriter Stephin Merritt plus associated musicians). It didn't quite take, but earlier this year I purchased their/his latest, "Distortion," which is a stylistic homage to the Jesus and Mary Chain that I preferred to the original...
Really stupid tax policy ideas
Posted on April 16, 2008McCain's proposal to suspend the gas tax for the summer (but who knows if it would ever really come back?) deserves some sort of prize. That one is going to be hard to top.
Senate Finance Committee testimony
Posted on April 15, 2008Today (April 15, natch) was the day. Here is the link to my full written testimony. The three main points I covered were base-broadening, rationalizing business taxation, and filing and compliance simplification for lower and middle class taxpayers...
James Banks and Peter Diamond weigh in on the income vs. consumption tax debate
Posted on April 14, 2008Economists James Banks of University College, London, and the renowned Peter Diamond of MIT have posted a new paper, called "The Base for Direct Taxation."The abstract says in part:"The essay presents the Atkinson-Stiglitz and Chamley-Judd results that capital income should not be taxed, but concludes that the required conditions are too restrictive and not robust enough for policy purposes...
Tax filing
Posted on April 14, 2008I'm done, but I didn't make it under the wire by very much. I use Turbo Tax, as doing it by hand would be intolerable (think of the AMT alone, or for that matter leaving one item out of adjusted gross income and then, once one finds it, having to do umpteen calculations all over again)...
Official witness list for my Senate Finance testimony next week
Posted on April 11, 2008The panel, meeting on Tuesday, April 15, at 10 a.m. in room 215 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, has the title "Tax: Fundamentals in Advance of Reform." The witness list (order as given in the listing I saw), is as follows:Daniel N. Shaviro, Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation, New York University School of Law, New York, NYMichael Graetz, Justus S...
Tax policy colloquium on "Long-Term Objectives for Government Debt"
Posted on April 11, 2008At yesterday's NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, my past and future co-convenor Alan Auerbach presented "Long-Term Objectives for Government Debt," a paper he wrote for a conference in Sweden (arranged by a new government entity there, the Swedish Fiscal Policy Council)...
Ray Davies concert
Posted on April 09, 2008Last night, after a very full day devoted to intensive labor on my Senate Finance testimony for next week plus sundry internal NYU matters, I returned home feeling a bit beaten down ("It's hard work," as Bush would say) but with an evening event on my schedule - a Ray Davies concert at the Beacon Theater...
NYU hiring
Posted on April 09, 2008We've now gone public on the fact that Mitchell Kane is joining the NYU law faculty. Mitch is a rising star in the international tax field and has things to say about, among other topics, recent convulsions in international tax policy thinking about the worldwide and national welfare considerations that underlie optimal (whether or not actual) rule design...
NYU Tax Policy Colloquium on "Making Social Security Work"
Posted on April 07, 2008Last Thursday at the colloquium, Jonathan Barry Forman of U Oklahoma Law School presented (or, given our format, responded concerning) "Making Social Security Work," a chapter from his recent Urban Institute Press book, "Making America Work."The chapter describes the Social Security fiscal crisis - which some people call large, others small, even when they agree about its actual size (a bit like arguing about whether a spill on the floor is big or small - what the heck, either way at some point we'll have to wipe it up)...
Forthcoming testimony
Posted on April 05, 2008I've been invited to testify before the Senate Finance Committee on April 15, from 10 am to noon, regarding tax reform basics. More details to follow, but the panel seeks to lay the groundwork for thinking about fundamental reform of the income tax variety that in theory might start taking shape next year...
Just a small point about John Yoo's torture memo
Posted on April 02, 2008Footnote 10 of the Yoo memo states that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to domestic military operations.Apparently, the commander-in-chief clause in the original, unamended Constitution (and/or the doctrine of necessity) trumps.An interesting question for John Yoo: Once the Constitution was adopted, was there any possible Constitutional amendment that would have overridden the commander-in-chief clause?Is the last-in-time rule inapplicable to it?Insofar as he is relying on the doctrine of necessity, is there any possible constitutional text that would limit the president's domestic military power?Is this guy actually a lawyer?
Yes, it's April Fool's Day, and no, I wasn't born yesterday
Posted on April 01, 2008Earlier today I got the following e-mail:"Dear Professor Shaviro:"We represent a very small but very wealthy nation that has asked us to approach you. This nation is about to launch a revolutionary effort to adopt some of the values of countries that have been developed economic powers throughout recent history...
New publication
Posted on April 01, 2008An article of mine from late 2006, "Disclosure and Civil Penalty Rules in the U.S. Legal Response to Corporate Tax Shelters," has finally been published, in Wolfgang Schon (ed.), Tax and Corporate Governance.On second thought, if you press the link you'll see that Amazon lists it as coming out later this month...
Ready for the 80s?
Posted on April 01, 2008I'm starting to think I'm not, or at least not ready enough to purchase the new B-52s and R.E.M. albums.
NYU Tax Policy Colloquium on "How Americans Think About Taxes"
Posted on March 31, 2008Last Thursday at the colloquium, MIT political scientist Andrea Louis Campbell presented a couple of draft chapters from her forthcoming (but still in progress) Princeton University Press book, "How Americans Think About Taxes." Once again, as when we had a paper by Carnegie-Mellon political scientist Christina Fong last year, a session with a political scientist outside our usual circles here at the colloquium proved to be a big success, intellectually broadening for all concerned, and fun...
My version of Amy Winehouse
Posted on March 31, 2008They say I got to go to rehab, I say "No, no, no"First it's my knee and then it's my hamstring, ow, ow, ohMy elbow's still inflamed, can't play no tennis gameAnd still I have to go to rehab, I just go, go, go.I'd much rather get to playThan spend thirty minutes every dayCause there's nothing, there's nothing getting betterIt seems like I'll never be okayBut they say I got to go to rehab, I just go, go, goI used to play lots of squashBut then that got the kiboshThey say I have to go to rehab, I just go, go, goI ain't got the time, and if I gave up I'd be fineBut if I want to play again it's rehab, so I say, ow, ow, oh...
Doing their homework
Posted on March 27, 2008I recently was invited to participate in a DC tax policy forum discussing the Clinton and Obama tax plans. I couldn't go, but I gather that the Clinton people had thought I might be a good person to discuss Obama's tax plan. This in turn is interesting, because many months ago (well before even the Iowa caucuses) I had a blog post that was critical of Obama's then-newly announced proposals...
Work, publication, and reading update
Posted on March 23, 2008One work-related item that I did have to take care of in Mexico was the exploding offer (mentioned in an earlier post) for my article on taxable and accounting income. The offer was from the Georgetown Law Journal, and after very minimal efforts to stir up a couple of expedited reviews I decided to accept...
Back from vacation
Posted on March 23, 2008We returned yesterday from a week in the Iberostar Tucan in Playa del Carmen, Mexico (near Cancun but much quieter). A pleasant week on a family resort that mixed the idyllic with, I suppose, the tired (such as some of the all-you-can-eat buffets). At my age, the real good news is avoiding injury (from sunburn, being smashed by waves, testing my elbow tendonitis, etc...
Ouch
Posted on March 14, 2008Well I'm glad on balance, but I got a law review exploding offer (96 hours) for my tax and accounting piece, less than 12 hours before I'm scheduled to leave for the airport. Managing this from a beach resort while trying to unwind is going to be interesting.
Tax policy colloquium on EC tax policy
Posted on March 14, 2008Yesterday in the Tax Policy Colloquium, in our 9th of 14th sessions and the last before our one-week spring break (which I will blissfully spend in warmer climes), Ruth Mason presented her paper, "Made in America for European Taxation: The Internal Consistency Test...
Musical update
Posted on March 12, 2008Stephen Malkmus' new album sounds at times a bit like the Allman Brothers. All those long hippie guitar rave-ups, albeit on songs that have characteristic Malkmus chord sequences and start-stop dynamics. I'm quite enjoying it, although the analogy isn't entirely praise...
Intellectual progress at the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium
Posted on March 07, 2008Yesterday at the colloquium, Mihir Desai, who will be co-leading things with me for the rest of the semester, presented his empirical paper "Foreign Direct Investment and Domestic Economic Activity," which concludes from firm-level data that outbound investment by US multinationals (MNEs) is a complement to, rather than a substitute for, their domestic investment...
My letter to the editor of Tax Notes
Posted on March 05, 2008This Monday my letter to the editor of Tax Notes regarding Al Warren's critique of the BEIT business tax reform proposal (mentioned in an earlier post) came out. The cite is 118 Tax Notes 1048-1050 (March 3, 2008), and a relevant extract goes as follows: [A]t least one of [Warren's] key conclusions, dismissing the BEIT plan as having no apparent rationale, is overly harsh in an important way...
Published at last
Posted on March 04, 2008My Stanford Law Review article, "Beyond the Pro-Consumption Tax Consensus," has finally been published, along with a response from Joe Bankman and David Weisbach, who I suppose I accused in my piece of intellectually overselling a bit.The Tax Prof blog has more of the details at http://taxprof...
Overheard in my Pilates class
Posted on March 04, 2008... from a middle-aged woman:"Obama is STUPID. He should have waited his turn. All my friends are voting for McCain if he wins. His wife is a problem."Talk of being true to your demographic ...
Adventures in rock concerts
Posted on March 03, 2008If anyone who will be in the vicinity of NYU Law School by mid-afternoon on Tuesday, 3/4, wants two tickets that I am holding to a potentially very interesting concert but will be unable to use, please let me know. The concert is by Dengue Fever, an LA group with a Cambodian chanteuse that mixes indie /psychedelic rock with 1960s Cambodian pop music...
Tax policy colloquium session on my tax & accounting paper
Posted on March 03, 2008Last Thursday at the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, we discussed my paper from last fall, "The Optimal Relationship Between Taxable Income and Financial Accounting Income: Analysis and a Proposal." Kevin Hassett did his last co-leading gig of the semester unless required to pinch-hit later on...
Academic wars in corporate tax reform
Posted on February 26, 2008In this week's Tax Notes, Al Warren of the Harvard Law School has an article critiquing Ed Kleinbard's "business enterprise income tax" (BEIT) proposal for corporate (and broader business) tax reform. I would be very surprised if Ed doesn't have a reply in next week's Tax Notes, and I am also planning to submit a short letter to the editor responding to Al's article...
Tax policy colloquium session on horizontal equity
Posted on February 22, 2008Yesterday at the colloquium, Brian Galle of FSU Law School presented his paper, "Tax Fairness," arguing that rumors in the recent tax policy literature of the death of horizontal equity (HE) as a tax policy norm are greatly exaggerated. I was not persuaded, but unfortunately there was a bit of a ships passing in the night quality to the session...
Vignettes from a short trip
Posted on February 20, 2008Last evening through tonight I was in Washington to discuss international tax issues on a panel run by the apparently prestigious Tax Council Policy Institute, a rather generic name for a group run out of KPMG that has conferences with lots of CFOs and such in attendance...
Tax policy colloquium session on probability of tax positions' correctness
Posted on February 15, 2008Yesterday at the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, Sarah Lawsky presented her paper, "Probably? Understanding Tax Law's Uncertainty."One thing I'll say for Sarah, she definitely came in with some flair. A key feature of the paper that she came to NYU to present is its criticizing moi (of all people), in this case for a hypothetical in a paper of mine discussing tax penalties, in which I suggest that a taxpayer taking ten positions, each 90 percent likely to correct, might on average have one incorrect position...
Bright side of the Clemens hearings
Posted on February 13, 2008As a Mets fan, I am all the more inclined to believe that Clemens is lying and that he is only getting what he deserves. But I also feel sorry for him and (emotionally speaking) not at all vengeful.But the true bright side of today's Congressional hearings relates to a comment I made at the colloquium last week...
Change in NYU Tax Policy Colloquium schedule
Posted on February 13, 2008For those who are interested in the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium but don't regularly travel to its website (at http://www.law.nyu.edu/colloquia/taxpolicy/schedule08.html), I've had to trade dates with Jason Furman. So I will be presenting my paper, "The Optimal Relationship Between Taxable Income and Financial Accounting Income," on February 28, while his, "Dynamic Distributional Scoring," will now be on April 24.
Longest exercise session ever
Posted on February 10, 2008This morning I went to the health club to do my regular elliptical machine routine (36 minutes, with cool-down). In addition to the TVs for each machine, they have huge ones dominating the room that people can look at while exercising.The one dominating my line of sight was set to Fox, although at first I didn't realize this...
Tax policy colloquium session on private equity
Posted on February 08, 2008Yesterday at week 4 of the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, Chris Sanchirico presented his paper, "The Tax Advantage to Paying Private Equity Funds Managers With Profit Shares: What Is It? Why Is It Bad?"These afternoon meetings follow a morning session with just the students, and then lunch with the speaker to hash things out...
More on the stimulus package - or, does Larry Summers need an economics lesson?
Posted on February 05, 2008According to Brad DeLong on his blog: "On the phone just now, Larry Summers just moved me appreciably toward enthusiastic support of the stimulus package by arguing, roughly: The big arguments against the stimulus package are two: It will become a destructive lobbyist Christmas treeIt will increase the deficit and yet fail to stimulate the economyWe appear to have dodged the bullet on the first argumentThe second argument is incoherent because: The U...
Early election returns
Posted on February 05, 2008Not that it will make any difference, but my sense this morning was that Greenwich Village is voting for Obama.
I've watched these ten times in a row, but I'm not done yet
Posted on February 04, 2008Both the David Tyree catch and the Plaxico Burress TD are available on youtube. Both stand up to repeated viewing, at least for me. The former speaks for itself; for the latter the great thing was seeing it unfold - Burress breaking open, the ball in the air, and (in total contrast to the Tyree play) you could tell what was about to happen...
Budget deficit projections for 2009-2018
Posted on February 04, 2008Sometimes I think I should publish my novel on-line, since I don't have a non-virtual publisher. It's funny and a good read.Bush's new budget is also being published only on-line. It's equally fictional, though a lot less funny and not so good a read...
Tax policy colloquium session on incidence of the corporate tax
Posted on February 04, 2008Last Thursday, my co-convenor Kevin Hassett presented his paper, "Taxes and Wages," an empirical study suggesting (based on international time series data) that corporate tax rate increases lower manufacturing wages, while corporate tax rate cuts raise wages...
Small bit of good news on the pop music front
Posted on January 30, 2008According to pitchforkmedia.com, Dennis Wilson's long-unavailable Pacific Ocean Blue is going to be re-released in a couple of months in an expanded version. This is reputedly a weirdly off-kilter lost gem by the Beach Boys' other gifted songwriter, unavailable for years unless one was willing to pay more than $100...
Interesting empirical paper
Posted on January 30, 2008A new National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, "Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?", by Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna, reaches the interesting conclusion (based on mid-1990s U.S. data) that, at least in the short run, the dominant empirical effect of violent movies goes the other way...
Bush's State of the Union
Posted on January 29, 2008I didn't watch it - it was just too tempting to have elective root canal surgery instead. Or at least I would have rated that about on a par with watching the speech.That said, but having read about the speech, just a couple of fairly obvious comments...
Tax policy colloquium session on deferred compensation
Posted on January 25, 2008Yesterday the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium featured a paper by Dan Halperin of Harvard Law School and Ethan Yale of Georgetown Law School concerning deferred compensation and recently enacted Internal Revenue Code section 409A.For a bit of background flavor, this provision responded to one of Enron's more outrageous scams...
Bad stimulus legislation
Posted on January 25, 2008If it were feasible to enact and enforce a constitutional ban on fiscal stimulus legislation, I would support it. The problem isn't with the theory of fiscal stimulus, but the practice. For extremely good reasons, it became generally accepted orthodoxy by the late 1980s that efforts to do it would almost always be bad...
Too big, too fast, too strong
Posted on January 25, 2008So what if they're only sixth graders. My younger son's school basketball team won its opener, 17-4, in 24 fast-paced minutes.
Fiscal stimulus, Rudy-style
Posted on January 22, 2008Since Rudy asserts that tax cuts always raise revenue, does that mean counter-cyclical fiscal policy, in his world, requires RAISING taxes so as to cut revenues and pump more money into the economy?Just asking.
Inheritance tax pushback
Posted on January 18, 2008Yesterday we had our first NYU Tax Policy Colloquium of the semester. This is year 13 for me, shockingly enough, meaning I've been doing it for more than a quarter of my life (certainly a strange thought).My co-convenor for the first 7 weeks is Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute...
Redefining tax expenditures
Posted on January 16, 2008Joint Committee on Taxation chief Ed Kleinbard was recently quoted to the effect that he wants to reshape and revitalize tax expenditure analysis.This is potentially a very good thing. As per a recent article of mine (in the Tax Law Review) and book chapter (in my book Taxes, Spending, and the U...
A Nobel Prize in Economics for Mitt Romney?
Posted on January 16, 2008Contrary to previously prevailing economic theory, it turns out that Detroit's auto industry can be restored to its 1950s status so long as we (1) replace Washington-style pessimism with optimism, (2) have a President who "fights for every job" (I hope Mitt still gets enough sleep - and who exactly does he fight?), and (3) eliminate fuel efficiency standards...
New achievements in phoniness
Posted on January 15, 2008Even by his own exalted standards, Romney is outdoing himself with all this talk about personally, as President, rebuilding the traditional auto industry, "fighting for every job" in Michigan, and so forth.
Guilty pleasure
Posted on January 13, 2008I recently downloaded Tommy James and the Shondells' Crimson and Clover - the album version, of course.Not that I'm proud of myself for this ...
No good economist should support a stimulus bill
Posted on January 11, 2008Let's think in terms of the actual bill we would get, not the hypothetical bill one might design. It will be late, a Christmas tree loaded with lobbyists' garbage, larded by both parties since otherwise it wouldn't become law, and full of bad new stuff that will just stay on as the business cycle changes.
Latest Rudy follies
Posted on January 11, 2008Our boy has apparently decided that the way to get back in the Republican race is to offer the biggest, most pandering tax cut of all. An unnamed fiscal policy expert has been quoted in blogs elsewhere as saying that Rudy's tax cut package is "huge," about 4 percent of GDP, or more than twice the size of the Reagan or Bush tax cuts...
Who's crazier?
Posted on January 10, 2008Bush says he expects a Mideast peace treaty by the end of his term. Isiah Thomas says the Knicks are headed towards an NBA championship soon, and that all members of his 9-25 team are untouchable.
The Bush Administration pays for the Iraq war!
Posted on January 09, 2008Jason Furman just sent me the following article from the Congressional Quarterly:CQ TODAY - BUDGET Jan. 9, 2008 - 1:31 p.m. Sparing Trees, Saving Money: The Fiscal 2009 'E-Budget' By David Clarke, CQ Staff There will be no delivery truck pulling up to the White House next month to unload freshly printed copies of President Bush's fiscal 2009 budget proposal, which is likely to total more than 2,000 pages...
Freedom is slavery
Posted on January 04, 2008The Iowa contests have me watching CNN for a couple of nights, which I don't often do (unbearable fatuousness and vapidity, and that's not even counting the politicians). But in watching discussion of the Republican race, I was struck (though I've noticed this for a while) about how "fiscal conservative" now means someone who favors huge budget deficits...
2008 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium
Posted on January 04, 2008The spring semester Tax Policy Colloquium that I have been co-running at NYU since 1996 starts up again on Thursday, January 17, with a 4-6 pm session at Furman Hall, room 120, at NYU Law School. My co-conveners will be Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute for the first seven weeks, and Mihir Desai of the Harvard Business School for the last seven weeks...
Latest reading
Posted on January 04, 2008After finishing the William Randolph Hearst biography that I noted in an earlier post, I sprinted through two novels, slacker-ironist Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision and dour Ian MacEwan's On Chesil Beach. The latter, though painful, is really good, and makes the former feel in retrospect a bit like amateur hour (though that's too harsh about a largely enjoyable read)...
Good news from Iowa
Posted on January 04, 2008At least, that's how I see it. On the Democratic side, I just hope Obama (if elected) doesn't actually believe that he can work "together" with Republican revanchists. But perhaps this is to a degree just astute packaging. And I am hoping he will be elected...
Retail sales tax versus value-added tax
Posted on January 03, 2008Bruce Bartlett argues against the Fair Tax here: http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/files/bartlett_fair_tax.pdfI generally don't bother discussing the Fair Tax, as it appears to be a dead horse both intellectually and politically. Even assuming one wants a flat rate consumption tax with no zero bracket, why use the retail sales tax model instead of a value-added tax (VAT)? The latter can lead to the same overall result but with better enforcement capabilities since the revenue authorities can cross-check rebates against taxes remitted on inter-business transactions, and since it can be embarrassing for a business to claim rebates on purchases without admitting to any sales on items that are no longer observable in inventory...
Shades of O.J.?
Posted on December 27, 2007Nice to see that Clemens is doing his own investigation of the steroid reports.
The movie versus the book
Posted on December 24, 2007I recently saw Citizen Kane again, for the first time in quite a few years, to show it to my kids (one of them anyway). When I then came across a William Randolph Hearst biography on a Christmas shopping foray to a Barnes & Noble, my interest was piqued...
On Romney's claim that he saw his father march with Martin Luther King
Posted on December 21, 2007The Romster has been taking quite a bit of abuse on this one, especially given the added revelation that in 1978 he told the Boston Globe: "My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit."He has been defending himself by saying that "saw" means "was aware of," not literally "saw," a defense that I gather he will not try to extend to the 1978 claim...
Double standards
Posted on December 20, 2007It's kind of interesting how the very same Senate Republicans who were threatening to invoke the "nuclear option" and destroy filibustering if the Democrats used it even a tiny bit, have now set the all-time 200-year record for filibusters in a single two-year Congressional term, in just eleven months...
Quotations of the year
Posted on December 19, 2007These are arguably the ten most memorable quotations of the year (U.S. only). I didn't find them myself - seven are from Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, as reported on-line in today's New York Times, and three are from an article by James Parker, posted on 12/18 at http://thephoenix...
Evidence from the crime scene
Posted on December 17, 2007I'd like to see Shadow and Buddy offer an innocent explanation of this little number. They know perfectly well that counter-top visits, and our food, are off-limits. Not that they care particularly, as one can see, but it is something they know.
A bit too convenient
Posted on December 17, 2007OK, a baseball aside admittedly reflecting my anti-Yankee bias.First Andy Pettitte is named in the Mitchell report for using human growth hormone. Then he promptly apologizes for using it just twice. So sorry about those two days, he says, "if what I did was an error in judgment...
Worth every penny?
Posted on December 17, 2007The U.S. Treasury has just issued the 2007 Financial Report of the U.S. Government, available here.Money quote, from page 32 of the document:"[The report's measure of the long-term U.S. fiscal gap] totaled approximately $53 trillion as of September 30, 2007 ...
Don't play for money, folks - he's a ringer
Posted on December 07, 2007On a lighter note, here is a new photo of my cat, Buddy, which has just been posted, but fairly far down the page, at stuffonmycat.com
Mitt Romney and my novel, Getting It
Posted on December 07, 2007My unpublished comic novel, Getting It, features a convoluted set of battles between the "hero," a character who is a complete phony and hypocrite, and his rival, who is even worse by reason of being a true believer in the values of their workplace, and no phony or hypocrite at all...
Michael Graetz's tax reform plan
Posted on December 06, 2007Today I was at a session at Columbia Law School where Michael Graetz presented his tax reform plan, from a forthcoming book. Among his main ideas is to enact a VAT and use some of the revenues to give the income tax a $100,000 exemption amount, thereby eliminating income tax filing for people earning less than that...
More bug-swatting (Mitt Romney edition)
Posted on December 06, 2007Shorter Mitt Romney, from his speech today: Being a Mormon is okay, but being an atheist isn't.Ugly intolerance fits poorly, to my mind, in a speech requesting tolerance.Since this raises my ire, let's have some fun with Romney's tax plan, which I had previously not commented on because it seemed just too easy...
Iran news
Posted on December 04, 2007I consider the NIE news the best that I have heard for a very long time. Good news not only about what's happening in Iran, but about the chances of stopping the lunatic Bush Administration rush to war. I had been periodically very worried about this...
Related Law Questions
How can I get my parents away from my bulling brother?
First of all, if you are paying your lawyer, you should not be on the back burne...
Can failure of an employer to provide healthy working conditions lead to wrongful discharge?
The Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) protects workers from...
The company I worked for forced me to quit instead of dealing with someone harassing me, what can I do?
Look up CONSTRUCTIVE DISCHARGE...................this looks like what happened t...
How to collect a personal loan from a spouse?
You local court will probably have someone to offer you some assistance as you p...
Is it legal for a company to overwork their employees?
Well, he could 1. Get a new job. Sister, I understand ya, if he's anything ...
#1 Online Legal Resource
On 08-28 at 21:13PM
Ten months later, Fed must reveal names of emergency lending recipients #FOIA
On 08-25 at 19:02PM
Squeaky Fromme, would-be Ford assassin and Manson devotee, released from prison
On 08-14 at 15:19PM
Likely unintended consequence of cash-for-clunkers stimulus is dampening of 2010 spending
On 08-14 at 14:34PM
Palm seeks to halt Palm Pre Android theme on copyright and trademark ground
On 08-12 at 17:30PM
Congressional investigation demonstrates Karl Rove lied about his active role in US attorney's firing
On 08-12 at 16:20PM
Family of New York City swine flu victim to sue city for failure to secure school #nyc #swineflu
On 08-12 at 12:59PM
Real Network's DVD copying software deemed to break DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions
On 08-12 at 12:57PM
Prepaid funeral operators indicted for $100 Million fraud
On 08-12 at 12:53PM
NY Jets join Cincinnati, Dallas, Green Bay, Houston & Seattle #NFL teams offering branded state lottery games
On 08-12 at 12:43PM
Are you the author of this blog? Adding USLaw.com to your Blogroll increases relevance. You qualify to display a USLaw Network badge.
Suggest changes to this blog's description or nominate another for inclusion. Register for updates.
How can I get my parents away from my bulling brother?
First of all, if you are paying your lawyer, you should not be on the back burne...
Can failure of an employer to provide healthy working conditions lead to wrongful discharge?
The Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) protects workers from...
The company I worked for forced me to quit instead of dealing with someone harassing me, what can I do?
Look up CONSTRUCTIVE DISCHARGE...................this looks like what happened t...
How to collect a personal loan from a spouse?
You local court will probably have someone to offer you some assistance as you p...
Is it legal for a company to overwork their employees?
Well, he could 1. Get a new job. Sister, I understand ya, if he's anything ...
 |
|
Contact Us | About Us | Celebrity Law Blog |
Our Partners | Disclaimer
| Law Blog Directory
| Law Jobs
| Law Tweets
| GoDaddy Hosting
All original material © 1999-2009 by USLaw.com. |