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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

Accounting rules and the financial meltdown

Posted on September 18, 2008
Today's WSJ had an interesting, albeit not very clearly written, op-ed by Zachary Karabell blaming post-Enron accounting rules for helping create the AIG meltdown. Read in conjunction with the WSJ's front-page coverage of the AIG drama as a case study in "deleveraging," the story appears to be as follows...

The AIG rescue

Posted on September 17, 2008
It may well have been the right decision, all things considered, but I must say I really don't like it. The obvious points are moral hazard plus the question of exactly what the government is going to do with the new asset in its portfolio.Interesting point about this is that the decision was presumably made by Bernanke and Paulson...

Behind the market meltdown

Posted on September 16, 2008
Why are these things happening on Wall Street, and what can we learn from them?Legal and economic scholarship concerning markets and regulation are actually in the ballpark of understanding this, if not of developing bulletproof answers. During my early years in the legal academy (which I entered in 1987), market-based, anti-regulatory law and economics was sweeping all before it - on merit, based on the insights it was advancing and the defects in prior ways of thinking about the issues...

Call me crazy but ...

Posted on September 15, 2008
... I've pretty much decided to stop following the 2008 presidential campaign. My sentiments are the same as previously, and I will of course vote. But I am simply finding it too infuriating and distressing; I could use stronger words if I wanted to get back in the mood...

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Fall of the titans

Posted on September 15, 2008
Lehman Brothers apparently was founded in 1850, and Merrill Lynch in 1914. The fall of these two titans - though Merrill Lynch is merely being sold, not liquidated - truly is an epochal event, symbolizing how high the metaphorical flood waters, no less than the literal ones in various hurricane zones, are rising these days.

Something about McCain that I've been wondering about lately

Posted on September 13, 2008
Let's see: he's been violent in public, and he's called his wife a "c---" in public. What sort of behavior in private does that fit the profile for?

Campaign / budget update from the Tax Policy Center

Posted on September 13, 2008
According to the widely respected Tax Policy Center, analyzing the candidates' campaign platforms:"The simple bottom line: under Senator Obama?s tax plan as described by his campaign advisors, the ten-year federal deficit (before spending cuts) would total nearly $5...

Krugman gets it 99 percent right

Posted on September 12, 2008
From his column today on the presidential campaign:"T]he deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts...

Out-of-print album watch

Posted on September 11, 2008
First Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue came back into print a couple of months ago - a great and very sad listen (if rather 70s) that is packaged with the equally good aborted follow-up, Bambu.On Tuesday, Tom Verlaine's Dreamtime is coming back into print, his second solo album after the (initial) break-up of Television...

Ten good things about John McCain

Posted on September 11, 2008
I've been a bit harsh on him at times, but here are 10 GOOD things about John McCain, the best I could think of:1) He performed up to his ability in military school.2) He never lies when his lips aren't moving.3) He's been right, at one time or another, about most major domestic policy issues (since he's taken both sides)...

Rosanne Altshuler becomes co-director of the Tax Policy Center

Posted on September 11, 2008
The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center just announced that, starting in January, Rosanne Altshuler will become its co-director, joining Len Burman and Bill Gale. This is great news on many levels. Rosanne, one of the best international tax economists in the country, is an incredibly thoughtful, careful, and creative scholar who has made important contributions and is at the forefront of thinking seriously and fair-mindedly (not a universal trait) about where U...

9/11

Posted on September 11, 2008
Being in downtown NYC, I saw the whole thing happen and then lived through the crazy days that came after it. I will never forget the shock, rage, and fear of that period.But by its seventh anniversary there's an even more hateful overlay. Now, 9/11 invokes in my memory above all:1) "All right, you've covered your ass...

When will the U.S. default?

Posted on September 08, 2008
For my current work in progress, "The Long-Term U.S. Fiscal Gap: Is the Main Problem Generational Inequity?," I recently took a look at the question of how fast, under current budget scenarios, the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio would explode. The sequence is potentially interesting because capital markets, in determining when U...

Open empirical question

Posted on September 07, 2008
Brendan Nyhan suggests that liberal blogger Josh Marshall is guilty of a "smear" when he compares Guiliani's speech at the recently concluded RNC convention to a speech by Josef Goebbels. Nyhan notes that "casual Nazi analogies demean and cheapen the discourse -- it's an easy way to active a series of unflattering associations and attach them to a public figure that you don't like...

Siberia sounds toasty by comparison

Posted on September 03, 2008
I gather from a Michael Isikoff blog on the Newsweek site that Doug Holtz-Eakin has been posted from the McCain campaign over to Sarah Palin as director of her domestic policy operation (such as it is).Wow - what a reward to Doug for having endangered his (previously justifiably high) reputation for all these months by carrying water for the campaign's wildly irresponsible tax and budget policies.

New wine in old bottles

Posted on September 03, 2008
I find the newly released Byrne-Eno album quite charming, even delightful, but am going to pass on the new Brian Wilson (odds seem high against its actually being much good).

Call me old-fashioned, but ...

Posted on September 02, 2008
.. while I think chest-beating invocations of patriotism can be over-done, I still have this crazy belief that elected U.S. national leaders should be, well, pro-U.S., rather than Alaskan nationalists.

Changing seasons

Posted on August 28, 2008
The signs are everywhere. Fresh apricots are no longer available at the local farmers' markets. The weather is less hot and more comfortable - a fact that is nonetheless dispiriting (though not as much as the departed apricots) because one knows where it is headed...

Back in NYC

Posted on August 24, 2008
I spent the last few days at an academic conference in Woodstock, VT. Best way to describe the local ambience is to note that even a gas station convenience store had microbrewery wheat beers and fresh whole-grain breads from a local gourmet bakery. I forgot to check for the whimsically named local brand of fresh dark-roasted whole coffee beans, but maybe it was behind the chai.

Big thought for the day

Posted on August 21, 2008
Getting older is like managing the retreat of an Army unit. You know you have to give ground and will eventually lose everything. But in the meantime you want to retreat as slowly as possible, keeping it orderly and preventing a rout. Anywhere you can stand and fight for a while you should if the odds are good enough...

Krugman on the U.S. corporate tax rate

Posted on August 18, 2008
There's been a lot of focus in tax policy circles on the contention that the U.S. corporate rate is too high, leading to one or more of the following claimed ill effects: (1) competitive disadvantage to U.S. companies abroad (which might or might not affect U...

If John McCain had written John Lennon's songs

Posted on August 15, 2008
"All we are saying is give war a chance.""War is the answerYou've gotta let it, you've gotta let it grow.""War is real, real is warWar is feeling, feeling warWar is wanting to make war.""Peace is over, if you want itPeace is over now."

Guiltier pleasures

Posted on August 14, 2008
OK, I admit it. I have been watching and enjoying Project Runway lately. It's especially helpful when I need to get through a bunch of exercises designed to prevent recurrence of any of the six main injuries that have cost me substantial tennis-playing time in recent years...

Tempest in a teapot

Posted on August 14, 2008
Speaker Pelosi is saying that the GAO report that came out this week, indicating that two-thirds of all U.S. corporations pay no tax at all, "highlights the need to revisit tax reform to ensure that U.S. companies pay their fair share of taxes."Now, I certainly agree about the need for tax reform, and for addressing corporate-level tax avoidance, but not based on the GAO report, which was truly a non-event...

Furman and Goolsbee on Obama's and McCain's tax and budget policies

Posted on August 14, 2008
In today's WSJ, lead Obama economists Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee continue to use the Bush budget baseline (for reasons I understand but regret).As readers can tell from my past posts, I disagree with plenty of what Obama is proposing, partly though not wholly because I have the luxury of not running a contested political campaign...

McCain betting odds

Posted on August 12, 2008
In light of the ignorant bellicosity that he's once again trumpeted in the face of the Georgia crisis (see here), I'd posit the following, if he becomes president:--Over/under for the likely average number of wars we'll be engaged in at any given time during his presidency: 2...

The state we're in

Posted on August 12, 2008
The Washington Post has an article today entitled "Obama Tax Plan Would Balloon Deficit, Analysis Finds."The key point: while Obama (with indisputable accuracy) denounces Bush's "reckless" economic policies that are "mortgaging our children's future on a mountain of debt," he is himself proposing tax changes that would add $3...

Right charge, wrong example

Posted on August 04, 2008
Obama is running an ad attacking McCain for proposing a $4 billion tax break for oil companies right when their profits are way up, and noting that McCain has just gotten $2 million in oil company executive campaign contributions.I gather the $4 billion is computed simply by applying to the oil companies McCain's proposal to lower the corporate tax rate to 25 percent...

David Gergen says the obvious

Posted on August 03, 2008
Gergen, not exactly a radical leftist, apparently said on TV this weekend: "When McCain's camp calls Obama "The Messiah" and "The One", he's really calling him "uppity." I'm from the South, and we understand what that means. That's code."I'm not from the South and yet it's been totally obvious to me...

Like Scottie in Hitchcock's Vertigo

Posted on July 31, 2008
That's a bit how I feel watching it happen yet again - the quadrennial attack on the Democratic presidential candidate as "elitist" and "out of touch," launched by Rove & his disciples on behalf of an arrogant multi-millionaire who wants to play War Emperor while handing huge and unsustainable tax breaks to very rich people...

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