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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

Glories of the past

Posted on September 18, 2009
OK, the Beatles box set is on back order, but at least I have my Pavement tickets, more than a year in advance of their 9/21/2010 reunion concert in NYC's Central Park. (UPDATE: Pitchfork reports that those tickets sold out in the first two minutes, so you can tell I was on the case...

World fame beckons

Posted on September 18, 2009
Apparently I'm very big in Israel, unless it's a separated-at-birth twin.

How NOT to be an "objectively" top-ranked tax law professor

Posted on September 16, 2009
Evidently, one way to lower your ranking is to write books, which in recent years I have found myself doing most of the time. Books can't get downloaded on SSRN. Thus, if you spend your time writing them, you do yourself no favors on the frequently published personal or institutional SSRN download rankings, such as this one that appeared today...

Matt Yglesias on why the U.S. will probably default on its debt (implicitly if not formally)

Posted on September 16, 2009
In re. why the Chinese are getting nervous about their holdings of U.S. debt, he notes:"It strikes me that any rational person looking at how the health care debate has unfolded is going to grow substantially more skeptical about the ability of the United States to pass major legislation in general...

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Addressing uncontrolled federal debt growth

Posted on September 14, 2009
Per Andrew Sullivan, there's a recent AEI piece by John Steele Gordon addressing the uncontrolled growth of federal debt. Sullivan notes that it's (of course) too easy on the G.W. Bush Administration, to which I'd add that it also misconceives the core problem and offers dubious solutions...

Bruce Bartlett on the risk of a U.S. government debt default

Posted on September 11, 2009
In his column today, he says - and I completely agree: "[M]arkets have always assumed that the federal government would raise taxes as much as necessary to prevent a debt default. That's the primary reason why U.S. Treasury securities are assumed to have zero default risk...

A sucker, or just another hapless (if tail-end) boomer?

Posted on September 08, 2009
OK, I've ordered the Beatles box set (stereo - I'm not enough of an audiophile fanatic for the mono). I did so even though the albums are so far past over-familiar to me by now that I generally will only listen to bootlegs and outtakes. Worse still, I'm annoyed that they can't be like Pavement, say, and have greatly expanded reissues exploiting the vast wealth of unissued material out there...

Tax reform recommendations (mine and others)

Posted on September 08, 2009
Tax Analysts has just posted "Towards Tax Reform: Recommendations for President Obama's Task Force," consisting of short essays by 32 invited kibitzers of all stripes (law profs, practitioners, economists, journalists, etc.). You can access the entire 130-page document here or my contribution here...

Game-changer?

Posted on August 30, 2009
Today we were on the verge of adopting this very placid and sweet-tempered 4-year old male cat named Seymour, when I noticed a mysterious lump on his belly. Could be nothing, but no adoption until the shelter has a vet check him out.

Some interesting health reform ideas

Posted on August 30, 2009
With the Obama health reform plan evidently struggling, a host of different (political and substantive) approaches are being suggested. Two in today's NY Times alone.Glenn Hubbard suggests reducing the exclusion for employer-provided healthcare and using the revenue to expand health insurance availability, e...

Krugman comes around?

Posted on August 28, 2009
In reading Paul Krugman, it's important to resist Broderism, or centrism for its own sake. For example, his saying harsh things about the Republicans, or arguing that the stimulus package needs to be much bigger than the political consensus has it, sound "extreme" in the standard Washington framework, but ought to be evaluated straight on the merits, where they often prove more convincing than the "reasonable" competition...

Paul Krugman on zombie Reaganism

Posted on August 24, 2009
Today Paul Krugman has an op-ed in the NYT asking why Reaganism, which he defines as "an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good," continues to dominate Washington policy debate even though events of the last few years have done so much to discredit it...

The problem with those on-line weather forecasts

Posted on August 23, 2009
Say I want to know if it will rain this afternoon between 2 and 5 pm, and the link says 30% for each of the three one-hour segments. Without knowing anything about the correlation, how am I supposed to plan?There seems to be no way of telling where the chance of rain, for the entire period between 2 and 5 pm, falls between the polar answers of 30% and 65...

Healthcare reform

Posted on August 19, 2009
The current debate's lack of coherent content has been quite startling, and indeed dismaying insofar as one naively hoped for better. I generally support what the Obama Administration is trying to do (though sometimes what that is, isn't entirely clear)...

Rare football commentary

Posted on August 19, 2009
The Brett Favre embarrassment tour continues.

Woodstock, 40 years later

Posted on August 15, 2009
Was I there at the time? Yes, if you're willing to count being a pre-teen in the back seat of my parents' car, caught in the very outskirts of the miles-and-miles-wide traffic jam as we drove to or fro a vacation site.Woodstock's little secret (not that my knowledge of this comes from back then) is that most of the music wasn't very good...

"Keep the guvmint off my Medicare"

Posted on August 11, 2009
The widespread view among healthcare reform foes that Medicare is not a government program inclines me to ask: If Obama gets away with this, what is the government going to take over next? Social Security?!?!?

Another day, another review

Posted on August 11, 2009
Alan Viard, in the latest National Tax Journal (Vol LXII, No. 2, June 2009), says the following about Institutional Foundations of Public Finance, the recently published conference volume (in honor of David Bradford) that I co-edited with Alan Auerbach:"The book is exceptionally well suited to serve as a tribute to David Bradford...

Quote of the day

Posted on August 05, 2009
From Captain Beefheart, in an excellent 1978 live album called "I'm Gonna Do What I Wanna Do" (that being his verbal response to audience requests for favorite songs):"It's very hard to do poetry in this world of Denny's staying open all night."But no harder, I suppose, than trying to revise the introduction to my new book while riding the NYC subway and listening to said live album...

Go ahead, make my day

Posted on August 05, 2009
Perhaps I can be forgiven for quoting highlights from the brief review of my book, Decoding the Corporate Tax (available here or here), in the August 2009 issue of Choice Magazine. "Shaviro (New York Univ. Law School), a distinguished tax scholar, does a masterful job of bringing the critiques together and explaining their logic in a concise, lucid manner...

Another day, another article

Posted on July 31, 2009
I've initiated posting on SSRN my new short (7,000 words) article, "The 2008-09 Financial Crisis: Implications for Income Tax Reform," and will post the link when it's up.The paper is based on PowerPoint slides for a talk I gave in Milan (or actually from NYC via skype) earlier this year, as per the preceding blog entry...

Oops, more delays

Posted on July 21, 2009
If there's one thing I really want to accomplish over the rest of the summer - other than taking advantage of the NYC farmers markets' fresh fruit bonanza while it lasts - it's to make serious progress on my international tax book, which has taken very definite form inside my head but needs to be extracted and actualized...

Oxford talks on U.S. international taxation

Posted on July 20, 2009
Powerpoint slides for the two talks that I gave a couple of weeks back in Oxford are now available on-line here.The one from July 7, "Planning and Policy Issues Raised by the Structure of the U.S. International Tax Rules," is based on chapter 2 of my book-in-progress...

Back in the U.S.A.

Posted on July 19, 2009
After a whirlwind week of sightseeing in London, we're back home and only slightly jet-lagged.Although I'm a summerphile with a taste for heat (at least up to the mid-80s), London's weather was reasonably pleasant. There's seemingly a rule there that it has to spritz at least briefly every day, no matter how sunny it may look in the morning, but for the most part we had decent weather...

U.K. vs. U.S. international tax policy

Posted on July 19, 2009
My trip to Oxford earlier this month for a pair of conferences, one academic and the other mainly business and government, gave me a close-up look at how tax policymaking differs both substantively and procedurally in the two countries.Substantively, the differences are pretty clear...

A week in Oxford

Posted on July 10, 2009
I've just completed a week in Oxford (with family), attending a Summer Symposium and a Summer Conference held by the Centre for Business Taxation at the Said Business School at Oxford. More shortly on the substance, including my own two talks (one on the main problems with the U...

On the road again

Posted on July 02, 2009
Last week (June 22-26) I was at an international tax conference in Berkeley. As it was devoted to looking at existing literature, I didn't hear much that was new to me while there.Tomorrow I'm off again to another international tax conference, this one in Oxford at the Said Business School (July 6-10) and involving a number of new papers or talks...

Tax expenditure analysis at the Joint Committee on Taxation

Posted on July 02, 2009
While Ed Kleinbard was Chief of Staff at the Joint Committee on Taxation, he sought to modify and revive tax expenditure analysis, along grounds which I thought added to its usefulness and intellectual coherence. What is going to happen to JCT's tax expenditure analysis now that Ed has moved on to USC Law School?From an interview with new JCT chief of staff Tom Barthold in the June 29 edition of Tax Notes:TA: Your predecessor also focused a lot on the tax expenditure issue and, for example, looking at how to define expenditures...

California's budget crisis and the upcoming federal budget crisis

Posted on July 02, 2009
California is teetering on the budgetary cliff these days, issuing IOUs in lieu of meeting its obligations because it can't adopt a plan to close the budget gap even though it is wealthy enough to do so without serious difficulty.The IOUs remind me of the line in Duck Soup, where Groucho asks Ambassador Trentino for a personal loan until payday and offers a 30-day note...

Back from Berkeley

Posted on June 27, 2009
I've just returned from a week of sessions on international tax policy that I attended in Berkeley this past week. My sense that I am on exactly the right track in my current book in progress, and that it will offer a significant contribution, is if anything firmer now than it was before...

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