Taxation & Estate Planning

The bogus tax-spending distinction strikes again

Posted on July 30, 2008
While McCain tours the land insisting that Obama plans to raise taxes, his chief economic advisor (leaving aside the buffoonish Phil Gramm), Doug Holtz-Eakin, has admitted publicly that Obama actually plans to cut taxes on balance. Details here.The ground for finding a net tax cut is that Obama's healthcare package would make heavy use of targeted tax benefits to increase insurance coverage and the like...

The actual 2009 budget deficit may exceed $900 billion

Posted on July 29, 2008
Despite my discomfort with using the annual budget deficit as a measure of long-term fiscal problems, I feel the need to say a bit more about the bogus $482 billion number that the Bush Administration has succeeded (through dishonest accounting) in putting into all the headlines...

Record budget deficit

Posted on July 28, 2008
Bush Administration officials now say this year's budget deficit will set an all-time record by standing at $490 billion, as compared to the budget surplus of $128 billion that Bush inherited.News media are using the $490 billion number even though it apparently excludes $80 billion of Iraq and Afghanistan war spending...

No comment necessary

Posted on July 27, 2008
McCain, on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, explaining why, contrary to what all the economists say, a gas tax holiday would be passed on to consumers after all:McCain: ... we wouldn't let it happen. We wouldn't let it happen. Americans wouldn't let them absorb that...

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No new stimulus bill?

Posted on July 21, 2008
Budget expert Stan Collender predicts that there will be no new stimulus bill this year, despite politicians' anxiety about being blamed by voters for the continuing economic slowdown, on the very shrewd ground that pursuing further fiscal stimulus might not quite make sense right now either for the Republicans or the Democrats...

Rewrite hell

Posted on July 20, 2008
The heading of this post is a great overstatement, but I do indeed find myself working these days on revisions to forthcoming publications rather than new work. I have minor revisions to make (but they can still take a bit of time) both to my tax & accounting article that is forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Journal, and to my forthcoming Urban Institute Press book, "The Corporate Tax: What Is It, and Where Is It Headed?"David Bradford once said that, if you polish a forthcoming piece to the point of perfection, that proves you have misallocated your time, since the marginal value of the last increments of improvement are surely less than the marginal value you could have created by doing something creative and new...

Is McCain really the author of the "surge"?

Posted on July 20, 2008
In a word, no. During the pre-surge years, his subsequent mythmaking nowithstanding, he spent at least 80 percent of the time totally supporting Bush and Rumsfeld and saying that the war was going great. He supported the surge when it came due to a simple kneejerk rule that he follows at all times: among all the politically credible options that are on the table in U...

McCain supports longer gas tax holiday!

Posted on July 18, 2008
Yes, three months is no longer enough, and he now wants to make the gas tax holiday longer.I still don't think he's going far enough. Why not propose generous gas subsidies? Or at least financial rewards for owning a gas guzzler, since he specifically emphasizes the plight of "low income Americans that [sic] are driving the oldest automobiles...

Next stop, Sundance?

Posted on July 18, 2008
I just finished taping a couple of hours with some documentary filmmakers who are bravely preparing a feature on tax reform and the problems with the tax system. They hope to have their film in distribution later this year. It's to be called "An Inconvenient Tax," and you can find out more about it here and here.

Bruce Bartlett on McCain vs. Obama

Posted on July 17, 2008
Bruce Bartlett, a leading conservative critic of contemporary Republicans who have hijacked and besmirched the conservative label, argues on the following grounds that McCain's and Obama's tax policies would be less different than one might think. To preview my response, it would be a better world if Bruce were right in his predictions about what they would do but I'm not convinced that he is right...

Last stand in Vietnam

Posted on July 12, 2008
It's Saturday night here (11 hours later than in NYC), and on Monday morning we start our very long journey back to the States, expecting to be back mid-day on Tuesday (although to our bodies it will be late Tuesday night).Here are a couple of shots of our Hoi An resort, where we've been spending a pleasant and relaxing last week after the more energetic touring of our earlier days in Vietnam.

More on McCain's "disgrace" comment about Social Security

Posted on July 11, 2008
Fungibility notwithstanding, obviously it would be absurd at this point to deem Social Security's payroll tax revenues as available for any other purpose, such as funding current workers' future benefits, unless one made it a true break-even by treating some other set of equivalent or greater revenues as off the table instead...

Semantic disgrace?

Posted on July 09, 2008
McCain has been drawing heat from the liberal blogosphere for calling Social Security an "absolute disgrace" by reason of the fact that young workers' taxes are used to pay seniors' benefits. They rightly note that he is criticizing a core feature of the program since its inception, thereby suggesting that he is at odds with what remains an exceptionally popular set of policies...

Sapa, Vietnam

Posted on July 07, 2008
After a couple of days trekking in Sapa (mountains in northwestern Vietnam, right by China), we have arrived at the Hoi An resort near Danang in southern Vietnam for our final leg out here. Sapa is striking and beautiful, though easiest to get to if you are short (the night train can be a bit cramped for the taller among us).

A new low

Posted on July 07, 2008
John "100 Years" McCain's claim that he will balance the budget by winning the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (permitting outlays in both countries to go to zero?) deserves some sort of gold medal for ludicrousness and audacity. I assume they were laughing as they formulated this one over in campaign central...

Mysteries of the U.S. presidential campaign

Posted on July 02, 2008
When you are abroad during a U.S. presidential campaign, even with Internet access most of the time, the stuff that is going on back home can seem a bit mysterious once one catches up with it.Back in 2004, I spent the big Swift-boating month teaching and vacationing in Australia...

Halong Bay

Posted on July 02, 2008
A 3-hour drive from Hanoi brought us to Halong Bay, where we stayed for two nights on a reasonably luxurious boat and went kayaking through limestone caves, climbing small hills on the islands, and swimming in the warmth of the bay (off the Gulf of Tonkin)...

McCain's flight suit

Posted on June 29, 2008
This apparently is it, courtesy of the Hoa La Prison in Hanoi (aka the Hanoi Hilton), which is now a museum. I'll admit to feeling a twinge of sympathy for the guy when I saw it, although it's my personal feeling that, in his late-career desperation (last chance for the brass ring and all that), McCain - much like Hubert Humphrey in 1972, for those whose memories go back that far - has definitively thrown his integrity in the trash.

End of class in Singapore

Posted on June 27, 2008
Week 2 of my 2-week Tax Policy stint in Singapore went pretty well. Though I was trying to explain fairly advanced ideas to people who had variable backgrounds in tax law and public economics, with time things kept getting better and it ended up being a good experience on both sides (I think)...

Random notes from one week plus in Singapore

Posted on June 22, 2008
Lectures would be going well except I am being over-ambitious (good students but they know less about tax than my usual in NYU) and I find myself running out of time each day. Adjustments in the second week should take care of the worst of it.When on Arab Street, visitors to Singapore should seek out Cafe Zam Zam but avoid Cafe Le Caire (distressingly mediocre for its venue)...

Feeding the sting rays

Posted on June 17, 2008
The Underwater World Aquarium at Sentosa Island in Singapore has a petting tank with tame juvenile sting rays (de-barbed to prevent Steve Irwin replays) that you can feed little bits of squid that you purchase for this purpose. The sting rays are delicate in grabbing the squid without gnawing your hand, an important detail that this picture (showing my arm) may not make clear...

The 2008 presidential campaign and the fiscal gap

Posted on June 15, 2008
From the Tax Policy Center:"Although both candidates have at times stressed fiscal responsibility, their specific non-health tax proposals would reduce tax revenues by $3.7 trillion (McCain) and $2.7 trillion (Obama) over the next 10 years, or approximately 10 and 7 percent of the revenues scheduled for collection under current law, respectively...

Singapore in a nutshell

Posted on June 15, 2008
I was walking down the street yesterday, and saw a woman walking her dog. Not only did she clean up the dog's mess, but she wiped the dog's bottom afterwards, much as one might with a baby.Meanwhile, a shot of a performing contortionist in Chinatown.

Scalia flunks History 101

Posted on June 15, 2008
From his dissent in the Boumediene case: ?The game of bait-and-switch that today?s opinion plays upon the Nation?s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us.?The president is not ?the Nation?s Commander in Chief.? He is the commander in chief of the armed forces...

Just before we landed

Posted on June 13, 2008
Photo courtesy of my wife. After severe jet lag on Day 1 (too exhausted at 7 pm to read a book or even watch Curb Your Enthusiasm without keeling over), we're feeling better today.

Off to Singapore

Posted on June 10, 2008
I leave in a couple of hours for JFK Airport, flying to Singapore to teach Tax Policy over 2 weeks at the NYU@NUS program.  The topics for the 8 classes are (1) public economics, (2) horizontal equity [and lots of related stuff], (3) vertical equity, (4) income versus consumption taxation, (5) corporate taxation, (6) corporate tax shelters, (7) international taxation, and (8) deficits and long-term budgeting...

Gas tax, the sequel

Posted on June 09, 2008
For McCain, raising the gas tax issue again may verge on being a forced move.  With gas prices up and the stock market down, and with Obama pounding him on the economy and his lack of non-Bush ideas, I don't see where else McCain can go.This time, the pushback against the gas tax holiday should emphasize more the point that it is unlikely to lower gas prices at the pump, hence it is actually a disguised giveaway to the oil companies rather than a sop to consumers...

Jason Furman named top economic adviser to the Obama campaign

Posted on June 09, 2008
I count this as very good news, not just because I know Jason but because he has, in my experience over quite a few years, been consistently fair-minded and intellectually honest, even when he took shots for this (an example being the Walmart dust-up a couple of years back)...

Vacation reading

Posted on June 09, 2008
I wouldn't entirely call it a vacation, given that I will be doing 28 hours of teaching in Singapore over 8 days, but I'll nonetheless be loaded with vacation reading when I hit the airport tomorrow night.  Unless I drop one to save weight, I'll have:1) Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties [for the airplane on the way out],2) Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 [Iraq War avant la lettre],3) Joe Keenan, My Lucky Star [supposed to be a Wodehousean Hollywood novel],4) Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy [not your typical beach read, but highly recommended here & there],5) Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle [spouse-recommended memoir],6) Rick Perlstein, Nixonland [hope it's not too depressing and is analytical not too shrill],The weight of these is enough to make one think wistfully about the Amazon Kindle...

Yes, economists can teach at law schools, but not constitutional law

Posted on June 06, 2008
Doug Holtz-Eakin appears to be branching out a bit from his earlier public economics insights as a McCain adviser, such as in his statements that replacing depreciation with expensing has zero revenue cost and that you can pay for $5.7 trillion in tax cuts over ten years by cutting targeted tax benefits that amount to $30 billion per year...

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