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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

Washington Post interview regarding Elena Kagan

Posted on May 08, 2010
I just spoke to a Washington Post reporter who is writing a piece on Elena Kagan that will appear if (consistently with the prevailing rumors) she is nominated. There's a decent chance that I will be quoted in the article if it appears, as in interviews like this I find myself having a fairly candid and unguarded style...

Misguided fecundity? (Metaphorically speaking)

Posted on May 07, 2010
When you agree to give a bunch of talks, it turns out (unless you're more devil-may-care about this than I am) that you actually have to prepare for them. So the PowerPoint slides have been pouring out of me over the last few days like - oh, I don't know, like kittens from a pregnant female cat (though come to think of it, her labor is a great deal shorter)...

Important findings from the Wall Street Journal

Posted on May 07, 2010
According to this Wall Street Journal article:"Male Mets fans were 43% more likely than Yankees fans to drink beer. They also drink more in general ? [but] have better support systems: they rated higher for marriage (51%) and pets (47%). By contrast, the typical male Yankees fan is unmarried (59%), owns no pets (58%), and is less likely to have children in his home...

Shortened blurb version of Nancy Matsumoto's Westview article on Getting It

Posted on May 06, 2010
"Hilarious ?. tightly plotted ?. One of the pleasures of Getting It is the narrator?s surgical dissection of Doberman?s motives and humorous descriptions of his inflated sense of self-worth ?. brings to mind the biting satire of Evelyn Waugh, or a darker, meaner version of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying...

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Westview interview / review for Getting It

Posted on May 06, 2010
Westview, a free monthly newspaper that is distributed in the West Village in NYC, has now posted here its interview of me, with accompanying review of Getting It.

"Taxation and the Financial Sector" posted on SSRN

Posted on May 06, 2010
I have just posted on SSRN a new article draft that I co-authored with Douglas Shackelford and Joel Slemrod. It's entitled "Taxation and the Financial Sector." I will be presenting it at the National Tax Association Annual Meeting in Washington on Friday, May 14, and later this year a final version will appear in the National Tax Journal...

First fruit of the end of classes

Posted on May 04, 2010
I am close to finishing a revised version of my article "The Case Against Foreign Tax Credits," and will sub it in for the old one on SSRN when it's ready. I think I've made what I am trying to say a bit clearer this time around. In particular, at times in presenting it I would get objections that struck me as orthogonal to my actual main points, and thus as evidently requiring revision...

Taken from the photo files at the University of Chicago Law School

Posted on May 03, 2010
This photo of Elena Kagan and me was taken in 1992 at a professors vs. students trivia contest. My, but both of us looked younger then. You can certainly see which one is the prospective Supreme Court appointee - the one with the Diet Coke rather than with what rather looks like a beer.

Nostalgia for things I was too young to follow at the time

Posted on May 02, 2010
I strongly prefer the volume of Rhino's 1960s Nuggets collections that highlights L.A. ("Where The Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968") to its S.F. counterpart ("Love Is the Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-1970"). Now if Rhino would only do a companion volume for NYC ...

Louis Auchincloss liked Getting It

Posted on May 01, 2010
Back in 2000, when I had just finished Getting It, in a version that was not quite yet final but I believe not far off, I sent it to Louis Auchincloss. I didn't know him personally or have any connections other than our both being in the legal world, but I found his mailing address on the Internet...

Which Shakespeare was Shakespeare?

Posted on April 30, 2010
The very silly film director Roland Emmerich is currently making a film called "Anonymous," based on the even sillier theory that Shakespeare couldn't have written his own plays, and that they must have been done by a sophisticated London nobleman or some such person, such as Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford...

Good news for people who like bad news

Posted on April 29, 2010
Alan Auerbach and William Gale have just published their latest update of the long-term U.S. federal budget situation. They use 3 scenarios:(a) the CBO baseline, which is based on the law on the books, which includes politically unrealistic sunsets for various huge tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003,b) the Obama Administration budget proposals, including those whose enactment seems highly unlikely, and (c)an adjustment to the CBO baseline that is based on "assum[ing] that future Congresses will act more or less like previous Congresses, for example in granting continuances to expiring tax provisions...

We could be heroes, just for one day

Posted on April 28, 2010
Now that the Mets are in first place, I think it's time to declare victory and cancel the rest of the season.

The first time you know something is seriously wrong

Posted on April 26, 2010
In Getting It, the first time you know something is seriously wrong with the people and the environment is in the second sentence: "They were due to visit him at 4 o'clock, and already it was 3:59:30."

Foreign tax credits redux

Posted on April 26, 2010
Tonight I'm presenting my foreign tax credits paper to an NYC practitioners' group. Meanwhile, I'm proceeding on three tracks with regard to its publication (with permission from the various editors). A short version will appear in the National Tax Journal (the papers & proceedings volume for the May 13-14 annual National Tax Association conference in Washington, D...

Then again, maybe not

Posted on April 25, 2010
Surely this NYT sports headline ("To Mets, Reaching .500 Does Not Feel Half Bad") is a reference to Getting It, for reasons you'll discern if you read it all the way through (as I think you will if you start it).

More summer plans?

Posted on April 24, 2010
We're thinking that Seymour should go to meowing school. As he gallops around excitedly in the morning when he knows we're about to head downstairs and feed him, he emits these half-strangled, high-pitched squeaks that suggest he never learned properly.

Summer plans

Posted on April 23, 2010
There is no shortage of projects I need to get to work on, now that I'm through with teaching (and most other academic responsibilities) for the 2009-2010 academic year.First up is a short article, "Taxation of the Financial Sector," that I'm coauthoring with Joel Slemrod and Doug Shackelford for presentation at the May 2010 National Tax Association meeting in Washington and publication not long thereafter in the National Tax Journal...

Summer here kids

Posted on April 23, 2010
The title of this post is taken from that of a 1998 song by Grandaddy. Perhaps not the aptest reference I could have chosen - certainly I hope not - as the oft-repeated theme of that song is "I'm not having a good time." Whereas I personally love the summer, both the weather and the freedom...

Another customer review for Getting It

Posted on April 22, 2010
Sorry for the intermittent monomania (if that isn't an oxymoron), but I keep having this feeling that even people who have heard of Getting It, and are reasonably sympathetic to me or amused by my having published it, under-rate (logically, perhaps, given their info and reasonable assumptions, but incorrectly) how enjoyable they'd find it...

An Inconvenient Tax

Posted on April 20, 2010
Attended the screening last night, then briefly spoke on a panel with Lee Sheppard and filmmaker Vincent Vittorio. In the movie itself, I got to talk about the "dead cat" phenomenon that led to enactment of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (i.e,. even lawmakers who hated tax reform didn't want the "dead cat" on their doorstep), and a bit about tax reform and income vs...

Smart versus dumb on Wall Street

Posted on April 20, 2010
I have no particular expertise regarding securities fraud, but my preliminary sense of the Goldman Sachs indictment is that it makes a powerful case, as explained by Brad DeLong. The tricky question for me is whether the cherry-picked portfolio here was bad for reasons other than its simply losing ex post because the real estate market headed south, rather than north...

From literature, on to cinema

Posted on April 18, 2010
Having given a book talk about Getting It at NYU last week, it is now time - though my Amazon sales rate is beginning to dip alarmingly - to switch my efforts to film.I was interviewed for, and apparently do indeed appear in, An Inconvenient Tax, the recently released documentary about tax reform and Americans' perpetual (yet perpetually ineffectual) dissatisfaction with the federal income tax system...

Deep thought for the day

Posted on April 18, 2010
Do cats wonder why the greens of our eyes are white?

Tax policy colloquium on Michael Schler's "Rebooting Section 356"

Posted on April 16, 2010
On the surface, it's difficult to imagine two papers that we would cover at the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium as different as Joel Slemrod's "Buenas Notches" paper from last week and Michael Schler's "Rebooting Section 356" yesterday.As discussed here, Slemrod's article is a brief exploration of general conceptual and design issues raised by the concept of discontinuity in system design...

More things that annoy me at the health club

Posted on April 16, 2010
How about, while stretching on the exercise mat, being crammed in too close to a narcissistic "Master Trainer" and his easily gulled client. The MT can scarcely pretend to watch what the client is doing, though the sunglasses he wears indoors are so dark he probably couldn't see anyway...

And earlier on the same evening ...

Posted on April 15, 2010
As I was walking to the subway to get to the dinner mentioned in the prior post, I passed by an individual on a street corner who was a bit disoriented and attempting to inspire donations. I heard him say to someone:"Hey, are you Dicky, don't be so tricky, Tricky Dicky ...

My book talk about "Getting It"

Posted on April 15, 2010
I gave a talk the other night about how and why I wrote Getting It and what it's about, with other related quasi-personal ruminations. Text is available here.

I probably shouldn't have said that

Posted on April 14, 2010
I was having dinner tonight with some childhood friends, going back to when I was a mere wisp of a thing (7 years old for the one I've known longest).One of these old friends, who I remember as a fellow New York Mets fan from way back in the day, said he'd given up and is now a Yankee fan...

Why the title "Getting It"?

Posted on April 11, 2010
I'll admit I like the title of Getting It, which came to me some time after I had started it but probably early on. Not everyone likes it - an eminent academic and long-time federal judge who I sent it to once (based on our knowing each other) urged me to change it as insufficiently descriptive...

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