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Taxation & Estate Planning

Start Making Sense

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

Post Frequency: 2.2/day

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

Political mystery, a.k.a. naive question

Posted on July 22, 2010
I am trying to figure out why the likes of Senators Ben Nelson and Kent Conrad combine (a) opposing the extension of unemployment benefits on the ground that this adds to the deficit with (b) supporting extension of the Bush tax cuts by reason of the weak economy...

Another reader comment on Getting It

Posted on July 22, 2010
"Lovely writing, fun, and suspenseful, with nice wry observations about humanity as embedded in a law firm."

Martin Feldstein endorses tax expenditure analysis ...

Posted on July 20, 2010
... as well as generally cutting tax expenditures. Today's WSJ op-ed is available as such to subscribers only, but you can find the full text of it on Feldstein's webpage here.Unfortunately, as a general matter only principled or genuine conservatives, rather than the right-wingers who play the role on TV and dominate the Republican Party, accept the central point of TE analysis that a targeted special-purpose tax cut is substantively equivalent to the hated "government spending...

Book report

Posted on July 19, 2010
Last night I arrived back in NYC, after 2+ weeks in Munich, including a 4-day excursion to the lovely town of Malcesine by Lake Garda in Italy. Though it was very enjoyable I'm also glad to be back, and wish I could leave NYC for longer periods in the winter rather than the summer...

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Paul McDaniel

Posted on July 19, 2010
I'm greatly saddened to learn of the death of Paul McDaniel. He was a great and pathbreaking scholar - exceptionally fair-minded and intellectually honest even when advocating a particular approach. Paul also was a lovely, kind, and yet spirited man (and good friend when he was at NYU), and an important institutional leader during his time here.

Munich's U-Bahn and the related tax evasion literature

Posted on July 08, 2010
Munich has a clean, modern, far-ranging, very easy-to-use subway system, the U-Bahn, which I gather dates back to the 1972 Olympics. Even without speaking or reading much German, it makes it a breeze to go anywhere in the city or environs that you like...

Live from Munich

Posted on July 08, 2010
Since last Friday, I've been in Munich, splitting my time between touristic activities and work. I'm visiting at the Max Planck Institute - not on the view that physics, no less than novel-writing, should be added to my portfolio, but because of the excellent tax group here, headed by Wolfgang Schon...

A word on status issues in the biz

Posted on July 08, 2010
It's always anthropologically or sociologically interesting to attend mixed economist-lawyer gatherings, as I have been doing in Munich and also do with great regularity in the U.S. The overall status relationship between the groups is clear: economists in the aggregate have higher status, although in particular pairwise groupings the lawyer may be higher-status...

Another reader comment on Getting It

Posted on July 08, 2010
Another airplane reader of Getting It (I frankly think it's ideal for this purpose) concludes:"Really, it's a great book, I happened to be alternating it with Philip Roth and I think you have a lot more to say than he does . . . although perhaps not the advance sales...

All too human (from the Munich Zoo)

Posted on July 08, 2010

Lyttle-Lytton Contest

Posted on July 01, 2010
Many readers may have heard of the Bulwer-Lytton contest, in which people compete to write the worst opening passage of a hypothetical novel, and a new winner plus a group of runner-ups (a.k.a. dishonorable mentions) are picked each year.Today, while twiddling my thumbs as I await the evening flight to Munich, I learned of the Lyttle-Lytton contest, an offshoot distinguished by a 33-word maximum length...

Yet another Amazon customer review of Getting It

Posted on June 29, 2010
From the Amazon UK website, under the heading "Just couldn't put it down" (with five stars):"Getting it is an excellent and highly entertaining book. It's a must-read for law students, lawyers and not only. The characters are so alive that you begin to empathise with them and live through their agonies...

Horrifying conflict

Posted on June 29, 2010
In September 2009, I purchased tickets to see one of my favorite bands of all time, Pavement, perform a reunion concert in Central Park on September 21, 2010. As Pitchfork or some other music blog remarked at the time, the degree of advance planning that this required seemed likely to be a challenge for Pavement's core audience of 1990s-style hipsters...

Marty Ginsburg

Posted on June 28, 2010
I was very saddened by the news of Marty's death, though I had known he was ill. Truly a wonderful and lovely man (gentle, ironic, appreciative of life), as well as a preeminent and brilliant legal scholar from a different era.

Empty nest of a sort

Posted on June 28, 2010
Our cats have been relocated for their care during our upcoming trip, to what I believe they regard as a splendid wild game preserve in northern New Jersey. Chipmunk population there has gone through the roof, but all our heroes can do is look - which they do quite avidly, as well as chasing the little critters along the wrong side of the windows...

Travel snafu

Posted on June 28, 2010
I was scheduled to leave NYC tonight on a 10 pm flight to London, from whence I would have proceeded to Oxford on Tuesday morning to appear at a conference at the Said Business School. I was scheduled to present my foreign tax credits paper on Wednesday and then to comment on an international tax paper by Richard Vann a couple of days after that...

Competitive imbalance

Posted on June 24, 2010
Most people have little interest in a sporting event where one team is vastly better than the other - the $200 million Yankees versus the $40 million Royals, for example, or a lion versus an unarmed slave in the Roman Colosseum back in the day.But games often have two distinct subgames - e...

Financial institutions paper

Posted on June 22, 2010
My article on taxing financial institutions post-2008, coauthored with Doug Shackelford and Joel Slemrod (hence, known to some readers as "S-S-S") appears to be getting a lot of play. Already my all-time # 3 download, for example, and recently linked here by Ezra Klein at his widely read WaPo blog (where it's item # 4).

Another Amazon customer review of Getting It

Posted on June 22, 2010
Herewith my second customer review at Amazon:"I highly enjoyed this debut work by Professor Shaviro. 'Getting It' is a very fast, fun read about three senior associates in a last-ditch battle for partnership. Unlike many other very good (The Firm, In the Shadow of the Law) legal novels set in law firms, "Getting It" is a more satirical portrayal of big firm life, and it is the better for it...

One more week in NYC

Posted on June 21, 2010
Hot weather notwithstanding, I love (one could almost say live for) NYC summers. So long as the AC is working and bug problems (mosquitoes, etc.) aren't too bad, sign me up for this full-time. But unfortunately school schedules (my kids' as well as my own) mean that we can't as easily get out of town for extended vacations during the rest of the year, when I sometimes really wish we could get (and stay) away...

David Zaring review of Getting It at the Conglomerate Blog

Posted on June 20, 2010
David Zaring at the Conglomerate Blog (which tax types will recall also used to feature Vic Fleischer) has just posted a brief review of Getting It. David finds it "concise, witty, and sometimes racy. I just sped through it, and commend it to you all...

Injustice

Posted on June 19, 2010
League semifinals. Down 1 point. 2 seconds to play. My son is driving to the hoop, is deliberately fouled. Should be 2 shots for the win - but the ref incorrectly calls it on the ground, not shooting, so they have to inbound. Proof that the ref was wrong is right here...

Free market economics, Joe Barton-style

Posted on June 18, 2010
If you think about it, tort liability is a shakedown, not to mention extortion, redistribution, and big government at work. So I guess companies shouldn't ever be liable for damages.

Basketball note

Posted on June 18, 2010
It's a funny thing how, if you tend to root for underdogs as I do, that means your teams usually lose. Perhaps I should have considered this more fully up front, meaning at age 7 or so.I rooted against the Celtics in the 1980s and actually did pretty well (the Lakers took 5 titles and the 76ers 1 to the Celtics' 3)...

Too much, yet too little, deficit aversion

Posted on June 17, 2010
I have to agree with Ezra Klein that the current Washington mania for refusing to address unemployment via stimulative fiscal policy is giving us the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, ignorance and an essentially aesthetic aversion to doing things that are known to work mean that we will have higher unemployment than necessary for years to come...

Possible choice to play Doberman in the (purely hypothetical) film?

Posted on June 13, 2010
A friend suggests Ed Helms, who plays Andy in The Office. Maybe so if Helms has the range - Doberman is far more formidable and energetic than Andy, as well as adding some of Jim's surface and Dwight's substance.

Who needs a dog when you've got Ursula

Posted on June 12, 2010
She can be so affectionate that I feel it isn't presumptuous to say: "I love you too."

Ars brevis, vita longa

Posted on June 11, 2010
Well, I've had my day of glory - Getting It rose briefly as high as # 622 in the Amazon book ratings (higher than I ever imagined) on the strength of Kashmir Hill's Above the Law review (takeaway phrase: "an 'American Psycho' take on Biglaw") - but is now slowly declining again...

What else is purchased by Amazon buyers of Getting It?

Posted on June 11, 2010
Someone actually asked me this burning question recently, so I decided to give the Amazon page a look, and found the following:BOOKSDaniel Shaviro, Decoding the Corporate Tax - good thinking.Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine - good match, as the world of Getting It certainly has affinities with that of rogue capitalism early 21st century style...

Another review of Getting It

Posted on June 09, 2010
The very popular and enjoyably snarky legal blog Above the Law has just posted a review of Getting It and interview of the author (moi), by Kashmir Hill. She says, among other things:"If you?re the type who is convinced that the people you work with in Biglaw are evil, conniving, and ready to stab you in the back with a really sharp highlighter, you will love Getting It ...

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