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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

New music

Posted on December 16, 2009
One wants to stay current if one can, both to hear new & fresh things and to limit (though without illusions) feeling too dated. That said, I really just don't get the enthusiasm continually expressed in some circles (such as the Pitchfork and Popmatters websites) either for Grizzly Bear or Animal Collective...

Tax-side vs. spending-side progressivity

Posted on December 16, 2009
Bruce Bartlett has a new post in which he says the following:"I think we should simply give up trying to redistribute income on the tax side and accept that it can only be done meaningfully on the spending side. This would require both the right and left to give up some of their pet ideas...

Is the veil available?

Posted on December 16, 2009
I haven't commented here on the filibuster angle in the healthcare debate. I do believe that the rise of the Senate filibuster as a routine rather than extraordinary legislative tactic is among the factors making the U.S. both (a) ungovernable and (b) likely to end up defaulting (at least implicitly) on the national debt...

NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, Jan - April 2010, current status of the schedule

Posted on December 09, 2009
All sessions meet on Thursdays from 4-5:50 pm in Vanderbilt 208, NYU Law School. Mihir Desai and I will be the co-convenors. The speakers are all set, but a few of the listed paper titles could change. 1. January 14 ? Lily Batchelder, NYU Law School, ?$750 Billion Misspent? Getting More from Tax Incentives? (with Austin Nichols and Eric Toder)...

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They don't make bad decades like they used to (I hope)

Posted on December 08, 2009
Michael Lind, in a recent Salon column, says:"In a few weeks, the second decade of the 21st century will be upon us. (Note to purists who insist that it will begin on Jan. 1, 2011: Get a life.) The first decade of this century is likely to be remembered as the Decade From Hell...

Perhaps the Wall Street Journal's news operation isn't defunct after all

Posted on December 08, 2009
I'm naturally suspicious of the Rupert Murdoch-era Wall Street Journal. Under the prior ownership, the editorial pages were shockingly slanted and dishonest during the GW Bush years. And they had gotten worse. At one time, while the WSJ editorials were predictably on the political right, they were less flagrantly propagandistic, and the op-eds had more of a range of views (e...

Best plan for reducing the fiscal gap that I've yet seen

Posted on December 03, 2009
From Jeffrey Frankel. Too bad it's entirely politically unfeasible (showing once again that what makes the prospect of default so scary is that the core underlying problem is political, not economic).

The logical final step in 99-cent pricing

Posted on December 02, 2009
Street corner fruit stalls in NYC list the price for a container of blackberries as $1.99. But they don't actually offer you the penny of change (to my relief given the transaction cost of putting it away). Someone should run an empirical study on their sales under this approach versus stating a $2 price.

Important experiment

Posted on December 01, 2009
I've always been fond of the monkeys-in-the-British-Museum meme (e.g., think of how many times they come within a final letter of completing King Lear, or indeed, albeit much more rarely, vastly improve it). But now comes this bracing dose of empiricism.

War tax?

Posted on November 30, 2009
There's been much discussion recently of the idea of a "war tax" to pay for the costs of ongoing fighting in Afghanistan. Specifically, David Obey and others in the House of Representatives have introduced the Share the Sacrifice Act of 2010, under which income tax rate increases would be used, starting in 2011, to pay for the costs of the Afghanistan surge...

Worst opening I've ever seen in a NY Review of Books article

Posted on November 22, 2009
From Diane Johnson, in an 11/5/09 review of the latest Margaret Atwood novel:"Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, announced on her Facebook page that she didn't want the lives of her elderly parents or her Down syndrome infant to be judged before Barack Obama's 'death panel...

Sad news

Posted on November 18, 2009
Earlier this week, former House of Representatives Legislative Counsel Ward Hussey died. Ward was the chief person responsible for actual drafting of the Internal Revenue Code from at least the early 1950s through the Tax Reform Act of 1986.That sounds like a left-handed compliment at best (then again, I'm left-handed and it's a strong part of my identity)...

Quick, get them a law prof or economist before they embarrass themselves further

Posted on November 09, 2009
On the New York City subway today, I saw the following ad:"Freelancers pay twice the Social Security tax that traditional workers do. And yet, we don't feel any more secure. Weird."Followed by a plea to go the website of the Freelancers Union, which is "working to make freelance fair...

Foreign tax credits

Posted on November 05, 2009
I'm nearing completion of a short, somewhat preliminary, but I think also provocative and surprising yet correct, article entitled "The Case Against Foreign Tax Credits." Not ready to post it, but the time may come fairly soon.

Waiting for 2012

Posted on November 05, 2009
No, that isn't a presidential election reference. I'd predict that Obama is reelected (running against an actual or simulated loon) after tough midterms in 2010, but that's not what I have in mind here. By now the 2009 elections are so earlier-this-week anyway, whereas last night's baseball travesty remains fresh for another few hours...

Available for free - unused paper title

Posted on October 27, 2009
"Tagging" is a popular idea in tax policy scholarship these days. The idea goes back to a 1978 paper by 2001 Economics Nobelist George Akerlof, called "The Economics of 'Tagging' as Applied to the Optimal Income Tax, Welfare Programs, and Manpower Planning...

True to life?

Posted on October 26, 2009
Two novels I've read this month - Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children and David Lodge's Deaf Sentence - appear to be building towards unpleasant or even horrific climaxes for the lead characters, but then they kind of trail away instead. I half-wanted the worst to happen, though also finding the prospect painful...

All three of them

Posted on October 25, 2009
They're getting along better these days, though Seymour and Buddy still stage the occasional squeakfest or batting practice. We are still building the trust level with Seymour (look what 7 years have done for us with the once-shy Ursula). Constant love-bombing gradually breaks down their defenses...

Meanwhile, back at the ranch ...

Posted on October 19, 2009
I had almost forgotten that the bizarre witching hour for a one-year disappearance of the federal estate tax is almost at hand. Under current law, the tax will entirely disappear on January 1, 2010, and then return to life at its pre-2001 levels on January 1, 2011...

Ups and downs

Posted on October 18, 2009
Today I spoke on a panel at NYU Law School's Family Day, when students' parents, significant others, siblings, etc. come to the school for a series of events. Pretty big crowd for the panel - probably about 500 or so. My topic was the long-term fiscal problems we face, and what the Obama Administration is (or isn't) doing about it...

And another publication

Posted on October 15, 2009
I have a short note, "The Obama Administration's tax reform proposals concerning controlled foreign corporations," that just came out in the British Tax Review. The full cite is 4 BTR 331-339 (2009). As it may not be easy to access in the U.S. interested parties can contact me by e-mail for a reprint.

New article in the works

Posted on October 15, 2009
Having completed the first 4 (out of 7) chapters of my book-in-progress, "Fixing the U.S. International Tax Rules," I've now decided on a detour that may take me a couple of months. To give one of its relatively novel ideas more prominence, I'm going to write a stand-alone article entitled "The Case Against Foreign Tax Credits...

From financial crisis to debt crisis?

Posted on October 15, 2009
Courtesy of Brad DeLong, Ken Rogoff has some sobering words about the next Halloween trick that the world economy may soon be facing.I remember Ken Rogoff from the strangely compelling WNET-TV coverage of the Fischer-Spassky chess championship match in 1972, where he was the briefly immortal Shelby Lyman's # 1 in-house guest analyst (leaving aside the hot-line phone connection to Edmar Mednis and the gang at the Marshall Chess Club)...

Bruce Bartlett's new book

Posted on October 14, 2009
If Diogenes went to Washington, he could stop looking once he ran into Bruce Bartlett.Bruce's new book shows that he is not just intellectually honest but persuasive, personally candid and - I hate to use this much-abused word but it's really the apt one here - genuinely patriotic, in that he prefers trying to save the U...

Good luck with that

Posted on October 14, 2009
Saudi Arabia wants monetary compensation from consumer countries if they cut their oil purchases in response to global warming.Next up, crack dealers want compensation from former customers who get their lives in order.This is actually a transition issue, akin to those I discuss in my book on the subject...

And another SSRN posting

Posted on October 02, 2009
My article from last fall, "The Long-Term U.S. Fiscal Gap: Is the Main Problem Generational Inequity?," has now appeared in print at 77 George Washington University Law Review 1298-1357 (2009). It is part of a symposium volume in the GWU Law Review concerning generational equity...

SSRN posting

Posted on September 30, 2009
An old paper of mine on endowment taxation has been reposted at SSRN here, because it belatedly occurred to me that there was an error in how the tables appeared in it.This is one of my old papers that I relatively like, although the literature it seems to have spawned sometimes seems to me to have a bit too much of an angels-on-a-head-of-a-pin quality...

The new cat

Posted on September 22, 2009
Our new cat Seymour still hides out a lot and tends to run away during the day. But in the middle of the night at some point he?ll jump on the bed, start purring and nuzzling, rolling on his back to be petted, etcetera. Then by morning he is gone (although he shows up again to be fed)...

New career as a film star?

Posted on September 22, 2009
If you view the trailer that's available here all way to the end, you'll see the first time I've ever been listed in a film's credits as one of its "stars." But unlike several of my co-stars, I didn't make the cut for the trailer.

2010 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium

Posted on September 21, 2009
We're far enough into the fall semester that thinking about the spring semester (which perhaps ought to be called the winter semester) no longer seems so fanciful. So I thought I'd post the recently completed schedule for the Tax Policy Colloquium at NYU, which I will be co-leading with Mihir Desai...

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