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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

The new baseball rule for extra innings

Posted on July 07, 2020
When the 2020 baseball season finally starts (i.e., if the pandemic doesn't stop it), there will be a new rule at the major league level, under which, for extra innings, each team will start with a runner at second base. The idea is to make scoring more likely, hence shortening the games that burn out teams' pitching staffs while also asking too much of the fans...

Zoom link to my session at the Critical Tax Conference regarding my minimum tax paper

Posted on July 07, 2020
I recently posted a link to the sessions that 11 of us (i.e., US tax law professors) held recently at a Critical Tax Conference that took place via Zoom (rather than in Gainesville, FL) once the pandemic got in the way. But now, courtesy of the Tax Prof blog, I can offer links just to my session (here), or to each of the 11, now available separately (here)...

Past laurels

Posted on July 03, 2020
I've listened a few times to the new Bob Dylan album, and I do think it's quite nice in its mellow way. But today, while we were out for a drive, we were just a couple of minutes from our destination when it ended, so I put on "All I Really Want to Do" (written in 1964 and released on Another Side of Bob Dylan in 1965)...

Another, much briefer, Ed Kleinbard tribute

Posted on June 30, 2020
Today at a Zoom conference I was asked to offer brief words about Ed Kleinbard. Not wanting to repeat myself entirely, I said approximately the following:Ed was a great personal friend, but today I want to emphasize the professional side.He became the most respected and admired practicing tax lawyer in America ? but that wasn?t enough for him...

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Zoom talks online

Posted on June 30, 2020
You can now see online the Zoom paper presentations that 11 tax scholars, including me, gave at the Critical Tax Conference a couple of months back. With closed captioning, no less. I discussed my minimum tax paper, which I also discussed today via Zoom at the Oxford Tax Policy Centre's annual symposium...

In memory of Ed Kleinbard

Posted on June 29, 2020
I wanted to express my very great grief, both personally and professionally, regarding the death of Ed Kleinbard, who succumbed last night to a vicious cancer that he had been fiercely, bravely, and creatively battling for many years. I'll start by repeating some words written by Joe Bankman...

NYC Tax Policy Colloquium - time finally set

Posted on June 26, 2020
In my earlier post about this year's Zoom-only Tax Policy Colloquium, I noted that the time for our PM sessions had not been set. After internally discussions we've now been able to put it at 2 to 3:50 PM, EST, on fall semester Tuesdays.One advantage of this time, we hope, is that people from California to Europe will find it feasible...

The Supreme Court denies cert in Altera

Posted on June 22, 2020
Yay, the Altera case is finally over, as the Supreme Court denied the taxpayer's petition for a writ of certiorari.Given how the 2017 tax act changed the relevant law going forward, this case really was not cert-worthy. Plus, in my view and that of many of my colleagues in the international tax policy community, the taxpayer's case was extremely weak, even though it somehow won (unanimously!) at the Tax Court level...

Familiar tax rules in unusual times

Posted on June 22, 2020
According to a WSJ piece (subscription required) from last Friday by Richard Rubin and Theo Francis:"U.S. companies brought home $124 billion in foreign profits in this year?s first quarter, the highest level since an immediate rush after the 2017 tax law, according to data released Friday by the Commerce Department...

Letter to Obama, Boehner, Reid, Pelosi, and McConnell

Posted on April 01, 2011
Yesterday's news included reports (such as this one) that "a powerful group of leaders in the business, academic and economic communities sent letters to the White House and Capitol Hill urging policymakers to work together to reduce the deficit by overhauling government retirement programs and an inefficient federal tax code...

March 31 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium (with Len Burman), part 2: Distribution versus allocation

Posted on April 01, 2011
As this is a follow-up to my prior post, you might want to start by reading Part 1.The last post ended with the damsel strapped to the railroad tracks, so to speak, in the sense that I believe I had illustrated a flaw in standard tax expenditure (TE) analysis that is as basic as that in the conventional taxes versus spending distinction that David Bradford so nicely illustrated with his "weapons supplier tax credit" example...

March 31 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium (with Len Burman), part 1: What is "Spending?"

Posted on April 01, 2011
Yesterday Len Burman presented his paper draft (co-authored with Marvin Phaup), Tax Expenditures, the Size and Efficiency of Government, and Implications for Budget Reform. The central is that mislabeling tax expenditures (TEs as tax cuts rather than disguised spending both leads to bad program choices and is a major contributor to the long-term U...

Education versus corporate governance

Posted on March 29, 2011
There's been some talk in the blogosphere today about Campbell's Law, which, as Wikipedia helpfully explains, holds that, "the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor...

Earworms, courtesy of Captain Beefheart

Posted on March 29, 2011
I've been listening quite a bit to the good Captain lately, at least when no family members are in the room. Ice Cream for Crow, Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller), The Spotlight Kid, Clear Spot, and soon to be joined by Doc at the Radar Station.Though one tends not to think of Beefheart this way, in fact there are lots of catchy or memorable bits that keep running through my mind when I'm otherwise engaged (such as writing, preparing for various talks and classes, phone conferencing, or playing tennis)...

March 24 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium (with Kirk Stark)

Posted on March 28, 2011
Last Thursday at the colloquium, Kirk Stark presented his paper, Bribing the States to Tax Food, along with an earlier (and recently published) companion paper, The Federal Role in State Tax Reform.The earlier piece discusses state revenue volatility, arguably a contributing factor to the horrendous fiscal problems that a number of states and localities currently face...

Lost opportunity

Posted on March 26, 2011
I've just started Simon Johnson & James Kwak's Thirteen Bankers. The brief period in 2008-2009 when the U.S. government could have broken the plutocrats' grip on the U.S. economy as part of the rescue reminds me of nothing so much as the moment at the end of the Second Age in the Lord of the Rings when Isildur fails to throw the Ring into Mount Doom...

New York Times article on GE's tax planning

Posted on March 25, 2011
Today's New York Times has a very interesting article (the clich� of choice would be "must-read") concerning General Electric's enormously successful tax planning. This has been a GE trademark since at least the 1980s, or well before the current generation of personnel were there...

Government lobbying rules

Posted on March 25, 2011
This past Tuesday, I participated in a very interesting event at NYU Law School: the 11th Annual NYU/KPMG Tax Lecture, featuring several hours of lectures, panel discussions with audience participation, and tightly structured debates on various topics within the purview of ?Increasing Transparency in the U...

Dividend tax holiday?

Posted on March 23, 2011
The White House and Eric Cantor are sparring over the idea of enacting a dividend repatriation tax holiday, Part Deux. Cantor proposes that U.S. companies be given a temporary low rate for bringing foreign earnings home. We tried this back in 2004, and academic research predominantly found that it did not (as promised by the proponents) lead to job creation...

The bubble metaphor pops again

Posted on March 19, 2011
Law school admissions appear to have dropped 11.5% this year, the Wall Street Journal reports.Slate Magazine's Annie Lowry goes for more drama, suggesting that ?the law school bubble may have just burst.? In addition, while the Journal emphasizes the decline in the legal job market in recent years, Lowry, noting that it has recently turned up again (and not considering response lags) posits that "the biggest reason may be cultural, not economic...

What did the voters know and when did they know it?

Posted on March 19, 2011
James Kwak at the Baseline Scenario blog is kind enough to quote me being, I guess, prescient 4 years ago when I wrote:"U.S. political leaders now seem determined to follow Nero?s reputed example when setting budget policy. They dicker with trivial deficit reduction packages, and then on a regular basis stoke the fire by passing much larger tax cuts, while the long-term budget picture keeps getting worse...

I guess he likes quilts

Posted on March 18, 2011
Seymour likes to help out around the house. Maybe he can work on the batting. Others like this one (except that they've been finished and have no cats on them) can be seen here.

What an immense relief

Posted on March 17, 2011
Facing time pressure on multiple fronts even though this is our spring break at NYU, I am immensely relieved to have completed a first draft (various footnotes aside) of the article that I've mentioned here several times, "1986-Style Tax Reform: A Good Idea Whose Time Has Passed...

Travel light and keep moving

Posted on March 15, 2011
It?s nice, I guess, to be credited as the founder or initiator of a literature that has burgeoned in the law reviews over the last ten or twelve years. Hence, I enjoyed noting a newly published article by Ilan Benshalom and Kendra Stead, entitled ?Values and (Market) Valuations: A Critique of the Endowment Tax Consensus,? which begins as follows: ?A consensus is hard to come by, and to the extent you find one you should be suspicious of it...

March 10 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium (with Eric Zolt)

Posted on March 11, 2011
Very interesting session of the Tax Policy Colloquium yesterday concerning Eric Zolt?s paper, Tax Deductions for Charitable Contributions: Domestic Activities, Foreign Activities, or None of the Above.Eric?s paper responds to scholarship that has argued for (a) more vigorously embracing the idea that U...

NYU/UCLA Tax Policy Conference

Posted on March 08, 2011
As detailed here, NYU Law School and UCLA Law School have agreed to launch a "joint annual conference focusing on tax policy issues from both a legal and economic perspective." The term is potentially ongoing although only the first two years are definitely set...

March 3 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium (with Adam Rosenzweig)

Posted on March 07, 2011
Last Thursday at the colloquium, Adam Rosenzweig presented his paper, Thinking Outside the (Tax) Treaty. The paper, which is still at an early stage, combines a fairly broadly pitched discussion of the need for international tax policy analysis to make greater use of game theory (which is claimed to have large potential payoffs) with a relatively narrow proposal...

Corporate tax reform prototypes

Posted on March 03, 2011
Tomorrow, at a conference in Washington, D.C. on taxation and debt bias, I will be giving a brief (15-minute) talk in which I argue that the currently dominant U.S. corporate tax reform model, which is to lower the corporate rate and pay for this somehow (such as through corporate base-broadening) is probably inferior to two alternative models that have been widely discussed...

Impatience and government spending

Posted on March 01, 2011
It's remarkable to watch the march towards a possible government shutdown (even if it is likely to be delayed for 2 weeks) based on the Republicans' insistence on budget cuts that reputable independent reports suggest will cost 700,000 jobs and result in significantly lower GDP growth...

Overheard while dial-flipping

Posted on February 26, 2011
"I really like Emma, and I was glad to see her again. I don't blame her for what happened. I think she just got confused."Emma is a moray eel, and the show is called "When Fish Attack."

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