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Taxation & Estate Planning

Start Making Sense

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

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Last Entry: November 04, 2020 at 16:18:00

Meanwhile, back at the ranch ...

Posted on November 04, 2020
I did the interviews for these short clips about Trump's taxes about two weeks ago - although it seems more like a thousand years ago. Perhaps mildly amusing even if just as a diversion from everything else that's going on:1) Explaining Good & Bad Tax Planning2) Residential vs...

NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, week 10: Steve Rosenthal on who owns shares of US companies' stocks, part 2

Posted on October 28, 2020
My prior blogpost offered some background concerning the methodology and main findings in Rosenthal's & Burke's Who's Left to Tax? US Taxation of Corporations and Their Shareholders. Here I shift to some preliminary thoughts on what it might mean, and what else we might also want to know...

NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, week 10: Steve Rosenthal on who owns shares of US companies' stocks, part 1

Posted on October 28, 2020
Yesterday at the colloquium, Steve Rosenthal presented his paper (coauthored with Theo Burke), Who's Left to Tax? U.S. Taxation of Corporations and Their Shareholders. This is a follow-up to, and refinement of, his eye-opening 2016 piece with Lydia Austin, which showed that the share of U...

Literature and Inequality book talk now available online.

Posted on October 28, 2020
The Zoom book talk I gave on October 15 regarding Literature and Inequality is now available online here.I speak for about 20 minutes after NYU Law School dean Trevor Morrison introduces the proceedings. Then Branko Milanovic and Kenji Yoshino offer remarks, followed by my very brief response and questions from the audience...

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Tax Policy Colloquiium, week 9: Michelle Layser's article on place-based tax incentives

Posted on October 21, 2020
Yesterday at the colloquium, Michelle Layser presented How Place-Based Tax Incentives Can Reduce Geographic Inequality.There is a degree of consensus (if not 100%) among tax policy scholars that place-based tax incentives - e.g., the New Markets Tax Credit or the 2017 Opportunity Zone provisions, which favor business investment in particular areas that are thought especially to need it, relative to investment elsewhere - generally are bad ideas...

Book talk on Literature and Inequality, part one

Posted on October 16, 2020
Yesterday was the long-postponed, and I hope not annoyingly over-advertised, Zoom session regarding Literature and Inequality: Nine Perspectives from the Napoleonic Era Through the First Gilded Age. (If not for the pandemic, this event would have taken place live in April...

Book talk on Literature and Inequality, part 2

Posted on October 16, 2020
Herewith the second of two blogposts regarding yesterday?s session discussing Literature and Inequality, focusing on the book?s main coverage and content. The book has three parts, each discussing three particular works.PART 1: ENGLAND AND FRANCE IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION ? Here are quick snapshots of Part 1?s three chapters: 1) Austen?s Pride and Prejudice: As Branko Milanovic has pointed out, Darcy and Lady Catherine de Bourgh are in the top 0...

Teaching on Zoom

Posted on October 15, 2020
I've now been teaching on Zoom for more than half a semester. I've had a surprisingly good experience with it, but alas that may not carry over so easily to lecturing on Zoom in the spring semester.The NYU Tax Policy Colloquium on Tuesdays has a public session (links available on request), at which it works pretty well...

Tax policy colloquium, week 8: Gabriel Zucman's The Rise of Income and Wealth Inequality from America: Evidence from Distributional Accounts, part 2

Posted on October 14, 2020
Carrying on with respect to the paper by Gabriel Zucman that we discussed at yesterday's colloquium, here are some thoughts on particular issues raised by the aim of measuring material inequality:1) Future Social Security benefits - Should these be included in distributional tables, at their expected present value? Does it matter, for this purpose, if they're funded or unfunded?I'd say it depends on the reasons for concern about inequality that motivate a particular measure, or use thereof...

Tax policy colloquium, week 8: Gabriel Zucman's The Rise of Income and Wealth Inequality from America: Evidence from Distributional Accounts, part 1

Posted on October 14, 2020
Yesterday at the colloquium, Gabriel Zucman presented the above paper, coauthored by Emmanuel Saez. This is a forthcoming Journal of Economic Perspectives paper that discusses increasing the menu of available approaches to measuring material inequality by linking up national macroeconomic accounts to information about individuals and households...

Snapshot from forty years ago

Posted on October 09, 2020
I happened to get an email from someone who was a fellow summer associate at a law firm 40 years ago, and with whom I hadn't been in touch since. He mentioned a story that he remembers from back then. I was in the law firm's library, and must have been asked what I was doing, as I replied: "Oh, I'm just belaboring the obvious for Chatham...

Tax policy colloquium, week 7: my paper on minimum taxes

Posted on October 08, 2020
This week at the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, we discussed my paper on minimum taxes. There was an excellent discussion, and I got great comments that will help me in revising the final version that will appear in the Virginia Tax Review. But since I don't discuss the sessions here (as they're off the record), and am not eager at the moment to spend time writing a blogpost describing my own paper, I'll pass this week on the usual post-session blog entry...

Trump's $70,000 haircut deduction

Posted on October 08, 2020
Regarding Trump's $70,000 haircut deductions, many commentators have noted that it isn't inherently fraud to claim something is a deductible business expense, rather than a nondeductible personal one, even if the claim proves incorrect, if there were genuine (or at least arguable) business elements to it...

Switch in upcoming NYU Tax Policy Colloquium schedule

Posted on October 05, 2020
For those who are following the fall 2020 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium schedule (Zoom links available on request), we've had a swap between two forthcoming papers:On Tuesday, October 13, from 2:00 to 3:50 pm EST, Gabriel Zucman will present "The Rise of Income and Wealth Inequality in America: Evidence from Distributional Macroeconomic Accounts...

Trump versus Apple in the tax avoidance realm

Posted on October 01, 2020
Apparently some people have been saying: It's not so unusual that Trump should use enormous losses to pay very little federal income tax. Lots of rich people and big, profitable corporations do it. E.g., consider how companies like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google may earn huge profits through operations that are run out of the US, and yet pay little federal income tax here...

Tax policy colloquium, week 6: Leandra Lederman's Of Risks and Remedies: Best Practices in Tax Rulings Transparency

Posted on September 30, 2020
Yesterday at the Tax Policy Colloquium, Leandra Lederman presented her paper, Of Risks and Remedies: Best Practices in Tax Rulings Transparency. (I'm not including the link because we discussed an early draft.) The paper looks at the issue of confidentiality versus disclosure with respect to private letter rulings (PLRs), which a tax authority issues to a particular taxpayer, definitively setting forth how a particular transaction will be treated under its tax laws, but generally without precedential effect on other cases...

The big New York Times story on Trump's taxes

Posted on September 29, 2020
Yesterday I feverishly wrote under a short time window, and then posted via the kind offices of justsecurity.org, a short analysis of the big New York Times story regarding Trump's taxes. You can read it here.This will be an ongoing NYT story, as they have promised follow-ups...

Tax policy colloquium, week 5: Henrik Kleven's The EITC and the Extensive Margin: A Reappraisal

Posted on September 23, 2020
Yesterday at the Tax Policy Colloquium, Henrik Kleven presented his paper, The EITC and the Extensive Margin: A Reappraisal.This paper challenges the previously prevailing view that the earned income tax credit (EITC), at least when it was significantly expanded in 1993, had significant positive labor supply effects at the extensive margin (pertaining to whether or not one worked in a market job, as distinct from how many hours one worked)...

Upcoming Zoom event on Literature and Inequality.

Posted on September 16, 2020
On October 15, at 4:30 pm EST on Zoom, I'll be discussing my recently published book Literature and Inequality, with commentators Kenji Yoshino and Branko Milanovic. The invite with Zoom link is here, and you need not respond in advance in order to attend...

Tax Policy Colloquium, week 4: Adam Kern's Illusions of Justice in International Taxation

Posted on September 16, 2020
Yesterday at the Tax Policy Colloquium, Adam Kern presented his paper, Illusions of Justice in International Taxation. It is a chapter from his Princeton Politics Department dissertation in process (in the realm of political theory) entitled Principles of International Taxation...

Tax policy colloquium week 3: Natasha Sarin's "Understanding the Revenue Potential of Tax Compliance Investments"

Posted on September 08, 2020
Earlier today at the Tax Policy Colloquium, Natasha Sarin presented her paper (co-authored by Lawrence Summers), Understanding the Revenue Potential of Tax Compliance Investments.The paper argues that restoring the IRS budget to a 2011-equivalent level, by increasing its budget by $107 billion over the next ten years (mainly for auditing and technological improvements), could increase federal income tax revenues by more than $1 trillion...

Tax policy colloquium, week 2: Clinton Wallace's Democratic Justice in Tax Policy Making

Posted on September 02, 2020
Yesterday at the colloquium, old friend (and former NYU Visiting Assistant Professor) Clinton Wallace presented his paper, Democratic Justice in Tax Policymaking. The article explores how to make tax policymaking more ?democratically legitimate...

New Jotwell post on Boushey et al, Recession-Ready

Posted on September 01, 2020
For a while I've been publishing annual very short pieces in Tax Jotwell, aka "The Journal of Things We Like (Lots)," which is a forum for bringing to broader attention recently published pieces that one especially likes. My 2020 entry has just been published, and you can find it here...

Tax Policy Colloquium, week 1: Steven Dean's A Constitutional Moment in Cross-Border Taxation

Posted on August 26, 2020
Oscar Wilde famously said that the only thing worse in life than being talked about is not being talked about. In yesterday's NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, our first of the year (in our 26th year) and the first ever on Zoom, I had a somewhat different experience...

Kleinbard tribute

Posted on August 26, 2020
A tribute to Ed Kleinbard that Joe Bankman and I co-authored for the ABA Tax Times is now viewable here.

Back to life a bit

Posted on August 23, 2020
This blog has recently been less active than it used to be, but a regular source of weekly posts is about to resume. With the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium resuming this Tuesday (you can see the schedule here), I will resume posting weekly ruminations, if that's the best word, regarding that week's paper...

Forthcoming article

Posted on August 19, 2020
The article I wrote earlier this year, What Are Minimum Taxes, and Why Might One Favor or Disfavor Them?, will be appearing in the fall 2020 Virginia Tax Review.In the past, I've typically published specialty tax articles (i.e., those less directed at a general law review audience) in NYU's own Tax Law Review...

Revised (and close to final) schedule for the 2020 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium

Posted on August 05, 2020
Things might still change a hair, but here is the latest news on the schedule for the 2020 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium. Since we will be doing the entire thing on Zoom, anyone who wants to attend virtually is welcome to do so. Just (a) let me know that you want to be on our weekly email distribution list, and (b) respond to my assistant saying that you'd like to attend, in any week when that is so, in order to get the Zoom link...

From the pages of the Yale Law School alumni magazine

Posted on July 21, 2020

Today's Supreme Court decisions on Trump's taxes

Posted on July 09, 2020
Trump won both decisions in one sense - due to his continuing opportunity to force delay, vital information that could shed light on his criminality and worse will remain secret, even from the New York DA, until after the November election. But he lost both decisions in terms of the legal issues...

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