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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.

Post Frequency: 2.2/day

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

Perverse satisfaction?

Posted on December 19, 2008
Today's New York Times notes that a tax break for homeowners, enacted in 1997, may have contributed to the housing bubble that (coupled with pathological defects in our financial markets) did so much to bring us to our grim current economic situation...

That didn't take long

Posted on December 15, 2008
In 2004, Congress enacted a temporary dividends received deduction for U.S. multinationals that repatriated foreign earnings. Under the temporary DRD, the tax rate on dividends from foreign subsidiaries effectively was lowered from as high as 35 percent to just 5...

Cat pandering

Posted on December 13, 2008
Couldn't resist posting this shot of Buddy, a.k.a. the "bad little bunny." Elmer Fudd wouldn't have liked him, nor Yosemite Sam nor Marvin the Martian, but we actually cherish his foibles.

Reasons to be cheerful

Posted on December 12, 2008
1) I've finally gotten to the end of a huge to-do list that's been hounding me, and frequently growing faster than I could cross things off it, since mid-July. While a new to-do list, possibly a lot worse than the last, is starting to loom and will be having its malign way with me by early January, for the moment I can't or shouldn't do most of those things yet...

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Meanwhile, back at the ranch ...

Posted on December 11, 2008
Aided by my enforced downtime (with fewer time-wasting temptations) during jury duty, I have completed a draft of a short article (under 6,000 words) entitled "Internationalization of Income Measures and the U.S. Book-Tax Relationship." It is in part a highly compressed reprise of the line of analysis here (forthcoming shortly in the Georgetown Law Journal), although it also addresses the question of how cross-border convergence in defining taxable and financial income might affect the tradeoffs I identify...

Feedback requested

Posted on December 09, 2008
I have a new book forthcoming from the Urban Institute Press, probably next month. My working title was "The U.S. Corporate Tax: What Is It, and Where Is It Headed?"Now I hear from the Press that they propose to cut the subtitle and simply call it "The U...

Jury duty

Posted on December 08, 2008
Today I showed up in Chinatown for jury duty, which I had put off twice (out of town the first time, teaching my Tax I class the second). �Wouldn't you know it, I got picked for a jury. �Civil trial, and I am hoping it will be very short or perhaps will even settle...

Someone's got to take out the trash

Posted on December 07, 2008
Amazing article in today's Times about Moody's. �They used to refuse any compensation from the issuers they were rating, because this would create a conflict of interest and undermine their credibility. �Then they decided to be compensated by those businesses...

End of the semester

Posted on December 05, 2008
I have just completed teaching my last Tax I class of the fall 2008 semester. I'm always ambivalent when this happens. Certainly, having more free time until the next semester is welcome; teaching has elements of being a chore and isn't necessarily the main reason one goes into this line of work...

Dinosaur poem I once wrote for my kids

Posted on December 03, 2008
Maybe ten years ago or so or more, I wrote them this little doggerel number while we were at Rye Playland early in the summer. �I recently spotted it in my closet. �With apologies to Robert Bakker (for his dinosaur novel Raptor Red), and for the historical inaccuracies regarding which species actually coexisted with velociraptors:The duckbill herd had drunk its fillThought Raptor Red: "It's time to kill...

Studied ambiguity?

Posted on December 01, 2008
For what it's worth, I gather from the Tax Prof Blog that the artificial intelligence program at Gender Analyzer rates this blog as (only?) 61 percent likely to be written by a man, making it the closest to gender-neutral among a group of tax blogs other than the Tax Prof Blog itself, which comes in at 52%...

Loser culture

Posted on December 01, 2008
Why are the U.S.-owned car companies so bad? �Presumably the reason is ingrained corporate culture. �They spent decades as oligopolists, protected from foreign competition because World War II had leveled the rest of the industrial world. �Plus, barriers to entry in the car business prevented domestic turnover a la Microsoft supplanting IBM...

Preparing to pivot

Posted on November 27, 2008
The tricky move the Obama Administration faces in budget policy is to go lax in the short run, given the need for stimulus to fight off recession, but then to steer back towards fiscal sustainability, with the drop-dead date possibly having been moved up from, say, the early 2020s to the late 2010s...

There's got to be a metaphor in here somewhere

Posted on November 26, 2008
But even if not, an amusing photo.Yes, those are baby skunks that she has evidently adopted.

Confession of a deficit hawk

Posted on November 22, 2008
Before the financial crisis hit, the U.S. appeared to be headed towards a fiscal calamity, probably no later than the early 2020s. The likely doomsday date has surely moved several years closer, perhaps to some point in the late 2010s.I nonetheless accept the need for something like Obama's Economic Recovery Plan, and also agree that this is the time to do healthcare...

If I were a billionaire

Posted on November 20, 2008
Certainly, under those circumstances, I'd be tempted to consider paying $50,000 to have our 18-year-old cat Shadow cloned, although I gather the cat cloning business isn't going so well. People raise ethical questions about cat cloning, rightly enough given all the unwanted strays, but Shadow, with his astonishingly good temperament (if we could recreate it), surely is a special case...

Which do you want first, the bad news or the good news?

Posted on November 20, 2008
Bad news, you say? The Dow fell 445 points today.The good news is that it can only happen 17 more times, then we'll be done.

Rangel corporate rate cut proposal

Posted on November 16, 2008
From Bloomberg, courtesy of Tax Prof:"New York Representative Charles Rangel said he's revising his tax overhaul proposal to reduce U.S. corporate tax rates to 28 percent, down from the current rate of 35 percent .... [to be financed] by targeting special-interest provisions that favor some industries and companies over others...

Act now while supplies last

Posted on November 15, 2008
My latest article, The Long-Term U.S. Fiscal Gap: Is the Main Problem Generational Inequity?, is now available on SSRN here.Abstract is as follows:Current U.S. budget policy is unsustainable because it violates the intertemporal budget constraint. While the resulting fiscal gap will eventually be eliminated whether we like it or not, the big issue in current budget debate is whether the ultimately unavoidable course corrections should start now or be left for later...

Colloquium presentation at Loyola LA

Posted on November 11, 2008
Yesterday I presented my forthcoming budget policy paper, The Long-Term U.S. Fiscal Gap: Is the Main Problem Generational Inequity? [to be posted on SSRN & linked here shortly], at Loyola Los Angeles.Ted Seto offered excellent comments in which he showed, to my surprise, that I am not at the most pessimistic end of the spectrum concerning where U...

JCT Tax Expenditure estimates

Posted on November 10, 2008
I've commented in the past on the great work that's been going on at the Joint Committee on Taxation seeking to improve the usefulness of the tax expenditure concept by wresting it free of the irrelevant side-debate with which it was long intertwined concerning efforts to define a "normal" tax base...

Stanford Law School conference on the tax gap

Posted on November 10, 2008
This past Saturday I was a commentator, at the Stanford Law School's tax gap conference, on a paper by Joe Bankman, Stuart Karlinsky, and Susan Morse concerning why cash businesses cheat (based on field interviews with people who spoke freely because it was confidential)...

Audacious stunt by the Treasury Department

Posted on November 10, 2008
Today's Washington Post reveals a truly audacious stunt that the Treasury Department pulled in late September, essentially repealing on its own motion Code section 382 as applied to banks. The ruling through which it did this is available here, and it appears to be aptly described as flat-out repeal of the provision so far as banks are concerned...

Go West, young (?) man

Posted on November 07, 2008
Later today I'm headed to California, where I will first, on Saturday, comment at a Tax Gap conference on a paper by Joe Bankman, Stu Karlinsky, and Susan Morse concerning cash businesses. Then, on Monday, I will go to Loyola Los Angeles and present my paper (from the GWU conference that I blogged recently here) concerning the long-term U...

Election Day

Posted on November 04, 2008
I got to the polling place at 6:25 AM - lines around the block, hundreds of people, I've never seen anything close on Election Day even more towards prime time. But the line moved well, and in 35 minutes I was done.The guy behind me on line was saying he hadn't voted since Perot...

Obama wins

Posted on November 04, 2008
Eight years of unrelieved ugliness are almost over.Perhaps the most important thing, in the long run, is that the Republicans return to sanity so that we have two reasonably responsible parties, as any well-functioning democracy needs. They have been stark raving mad for 14 years now, relentlessly undermining civil society and seeking to destroy honest public discourse along with the rule of law...

The flat tax isn't flat

Posted on November 03, 2008
Freddie, a thoughtful conservative blogger not previously known to me but linked by Andrew Sullivan, says the following about McCain's "socialism" attack:"I think we could have an election that involves a major debate about the progressive income tax, but in order to have it, we'd have to have a candidate who is actually opposed to progressive taxation...

Nate, don't fail me now

Posted on November 03, 2008
On Election Eve, Silver at fivethirtyeight.com has it up to 98.1 percent.This will make it easier to sleep tonight.I'm planning to vote by 6:30 a.m., but just the once.

Economist Christine Romer on fiscal policy

Posted on November 02, 2008
From an interview (along with her husband David Romer) in a Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis publication, the Region:"What's very striking is that we had a pretty sensible long-run fiscal view in the 1950s - the budget should be balanced over the medium run, but not each and every year and not in exceptional circumstances ...

Income inequality vs. consumption inequality

Posted on October 31, 2008
A post today by Kevin Drum reminded me of an issue that arose in the media a few months back that I've meant to address. Some economists (I gather mainly conservative ones) argue that focusing on income inequality is misguided. Thus, according to Michael Cox and Richard Alm some months back:"Looking at a far more direct measure of American families? economic status ? household consumption ? indicates that the gap between rich and poor is far less than most assume, and that the abstract, income-based way in which we measure the so-called poverty rate no longer applies to our society...

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