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Taxation & Estate Planning

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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

Amusing writer

Posted on November 21, 2010
I'm currently reading Bad News, a novel in the Dortmunder series by Donald Westlake (recently deceased author of a lot of very funny and well-written genre fiction). Here's a typical passage that caught my eye:"The New York lawyer looked like a hawk who hadn't eaten for a week...

International tax panel at NTA Annual Meeting

Posted on November 20, 2010
Yesterday I participated in an NTA panel that addressed U.S. international tax policy and where it should be heading. Others on the panel were Jane Gravelle, Ed Kleinbard, and Lee Sheppard, and Jim Hines unofficially served as commentator via extended questions that he asked each of us, as a kind of point of personal privilege (quite reasonable, I thought, under the circumstances) because the panel tended to disagree with him...

Income tax rates above 50 percent?

Posted on November 20, 2010
One of the headline events at the NTA Annual Conference was a speech by Emmanuel Saez on fundamental tax reform. Emmanuel, a rightly multiply-prize-winning mainly empirical economist, is perhaps best known for his work showing how income distribution has changed over the last few decades, becoming vastly more concentrated at the very top...

Kocherlakota lunch talk at National Tax Association meeting

Posted on November 19, 2010
Today (Thursday, November 18) was my first day at the National Tax Association?s 103rd Annual Conference on Taxation, being held in Chicago. (Being posted a day later, however, due to web access issues at the execrably out-of-the-way Hyatt Regency McCormick Place in, but not really of, Chicago...

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Pop culture non-news

Posted on November 16, 2010
The Beatles on iTunes isn't exactly big news; it's not as if their catalog has been unavailable or under-exposed.What would be big news is if they let iTunes put up as much as possible from among the unreleased recordings by the group (including but not limited to the vast array of bootlegs that are out there)...

Today's single most pathetic news item

Posted on November 15, 2010
Obama has now endorsed the theory that he lost in 2010 for not being bipartisan enough. He is defining political success as getting people (such as McConnell) who state openly that their chief goal is to defeat him, to agree to hand him political victories...

One point no one seems to realize about the deficit commission report and tax revenues

Posted on November 14, 2010
Everyone (indeed, including me) has been discussing the deficit commission report as if the plan were to have an almost revenue-neutral tax reform, with rate cuts handing back the revenues raised from tax expenditure repeal except for net revenue-raising of an initial $80 billion per year...

Brilliant new policy idea: the CFNIA

Posted on November 13, 2010
Democrats in Congress have a brilliant new policy idea: the CFNIA, or "Compensation For No Inflation Adjustment." Pronounced "siffneeah."You see, if you're on a fixed budget and prices don't go up, you don't lose any ground. But this apparently is a bad thing (although I hadn't realized it before)...

Paul Krugman on the Entitlement Commission?s tax reform plans

Posted on November 12, 2010
In his NYT column today, ?The Hijacked Commission,? Paul Krugman harshly criticizes the Entitlement Commission?s tax reform proposals. Krugman is a lightning rod, of course, but in my view he?s been right about a lot of things. Here, however, he is in part taking on views widely accepted in the tax policy community, from at least moderate left to right...

Did the White House cave on extending the Bush tax cuts?

Posted on November 11, 2010
Short answer: this depends on how you define the White House's objectives.To summarize the underlying story, there has been much back-and-forth in the on-line press today relating to a David Axelrod statement that the White House accepts the reality of the world we live in, a potentially anodyne principle that it more controversially interprets as meaning it can't get the expiring individual tax rate cuts below the top bracket extended permanently, while not also signing on to permanent extension of the top-rate tax cuts (which the White House, I gather and hope, remains unwilling to do)...

Upcoming international tax policy talk at the NTA

Posted on November 10, 2010
Oops, interrupting my international tax book again, this time to prepare slides for my talk in Chicago next week (Nov. 19) at the National Tax Association's 103rd Annual Conference on Taxation, where I will be on a panel discussion (with Donald Marples, Jane Gravelle, Ed Kleinbard, and Lee Sheppard) entitled "International Corporate Taxation: Are We Headed in the Right Direction"?I'm enthusiastic about how my slides (which I will as usual post on the NYU Law website and this blog) are shaping up...

Entitlement Commission's preliminary report

Posted on November 10, 2010
It's available here. Just ignore the words on the title page that say "Draft Document - Do Not Quote, Cite, or Release" along with the bit on the top of each page that says "Draft - Do Not Cite." Everyone else out there is ignoring these words, after all (and I don't happen to know if what we have here is a trial balloon or a leak)...

NTA photo

Posted on November 09, 2010
Since I presented my foreign tax credit paper at Rutgers Camden yesterday, why not post a photo I just received by e-mail (via a newsletter attachment) this morning, apparently taken when I was presenting the same paper at a National Tax Association conference in Washington this past May...

Martin Sullivan's Part 2 on the approaching U.S. fiscal crisis

Posted on November 08, 2010
This one bears the cheery title, "Fiscal Crisis, Part 2: Catastrophe." Among the points he mentions (from the Len Burman paper I linked here recently, among others) is that, once U.S. debt levels get high enough, rising interest rates for U.S. borrowing (whether triggered by default worries or otherwise) can create a runaway, self-reinforcing cycle that leads to default...

Rutgers-Camden Law School book talk today on Getting It

Posted on November 08, 2010
OK, let's concede off the bat that turnout was disappointingly low. No need to get too specific (although if you said no one attended you'd be wrong).But in preparing for the session, it occurred to me at how deep a level (if I may say so), and going beyond just style, Getting It is a genuine cultural adaptation or rethinking of a Wodehouse novel...

Wascally wabbit

Posted on November 04, 2010
Buddy, shown here dipping a toe in the waters of the dining room table (so to speak) because there was meat nearby (albeit heavily guarded), always reminds me of Wile E. Coyote in the intensity of his passion for more food. But unlike Wile E. slinking away each time, he never gets discouraged...

Strange adventures in publishing

Posted on November 03, 2010
I've just completed an odd experience in the Getting It promotion front. There is an American legal practice-related on-line journal, which I won't name any more precisely than I already have, that occurred to me as a possible vehicle for discussing the novel, which does after all arguably provide a window of sorts into what being a young lawyer at a big firm is like...

Megan McArdle needs a tax primer

Posted on November 02, 2010
Her article in the Atlantic today, "Why We Should Eliminate the Corporate Income Tax," makes some good points. Missing, of course, is any sense of the revenue implications of eliminating the corporate income tax given the long-term fiscal gap.Two more fundamental problems are the following...

Election Day reflections

Posted on November 02, 2010
I did my civic duty this morning (despite the voting paradox), going to P.S. 41 in the West Village this morning to cast an all-Democratic ballot.It's a good thing that the Republicans have made it unnecessary for me to consider them (as I might have been willing to do, here and there, if they had not gone stark raving mad in 1994 and then just grown continually worse)...

Another example of why I don't like David Brooks

Posted on November 02, 2010
There are times when Brooks tries to be a good columnist. Unfortunately, this tends to bring out a great deal of pomposity and not very knowledgeable generalization about history, economics, sociological trends, etcetera. There is a reason why academics have training and professional standards when they do this stuff...

More doom and gloom

Posted on November 01, 2010
Herewith Part One of Martin Sullivan's take (similar to mine and that of pretty much everyone else who's looked at the problem) on the threat of an approaching U.S. fiscal collapse.

Why is the U.S. headed for fiscal disaster (if it is)? - Part One

Posted on October 29, 2010
Len Burman?s paper, ?Catastrophic Budget Failure,? presented yesterday at Columbia Law School?s tax policy colloquium, describes how the end game of U.S. fiscal unsustainability could potentially play out. Short version: it might not be pretty.Also, the paper shows that, with a couple of reasonable assumptions, such as about how interest rates might start to rise about ten years from now in response to the U...

Video of the NYU Forum on extending the Bush tax cuts

Posted on October 29, 2010
Here it is, more than an hour long but not without some amusing moments. Includes brief commentary on 1980s vs. 70s and 90s pop music, and on rejecting science versus rejecting arithmetic.

Why is the U.S. headed for fiscal disaster (if it is)? - Part Three

Posted on October 29, 2010
The fiscal meltdown scenario that Len Burman and others posit as a significant possibility, and that I affirmatively believe will happen in the U.S. within the next 15 years, requires that financial markets fail to operate smoothly or efficiently.Suppose the U...

Why is the U.S. headed for fiscal disaster (if it is)? - Part Two

Posted on October 29, 2010
The political story behind expecting a U.S. fiscal disaster is that nothing like the benign story of the Brookings and AEI experts designing the best available compromise solution to restore sustainability will ever be allowed to happen. Instead, the doomsayers (including me) say, we?ll refuse to turn off the road to a budgetary disaster until it?s too late, even though the fixes would be much less bad than permitting the disaster to occur...

Revised paper

Posted on October 28, 2010
Kim Clausing and I have posted on SSRN a revised version of our paper, "A Burden-Neutral Shift from Foreign Tax Creditability to Deductibility?"While generally similar to the previous draft, we've cleaned up a few problems and tried to make the analysis and motivation clearer.

NYU Forum on extending the Bush tax cuts

Posted on October 27, 2010
As expected, a good session (and with high student attendance) reflecting considerable agreement between Diane Lim Rogers, Alan Viard, and myself.Brief excerpt from my introductory remarks:"I see 3 key facts for today?s discussion. First, we?re either in recession or just out of it with a danger of severe relapse...

Cheerful discussions of the long-term U.S. budget situation

Posted on October 26, 2010
As I've previously mentioned, at tomorrow's Forum at NYU Law School, Diane Lim Rogers, Alan Viard, and I will be discussing the budgetary insanity of extending some or all of the expiring Bush era individual tax cuts. I will post my introductory remarks shortly after the event...

Unintended ambiguity?

Posted on October 25, 2010
On my way back to NYU after my lunch talk at St. John's earlier today, I saw a parked car with two bumper stickers. The first said "No drilling." The second said, "No farms, no food."Reading the second one in light of the first one, I wanted to tell the car owner, Hey, I hate drilling too, what with BP & the Gulf and all that, but do you really want to do away with all farms and food?

Talk today at St. John's University Law School

Posted on October 25, 2010
I'm heading to Queens, NYC shortly to give a lunch talk at St. John's University Law School, based on my just-published paper (with Doug Shackelford and Joel Slemrod) Taxation and the Financial Sector.I've given talks on this paper and posted the slides before...

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