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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

What a kidder

Posted on June 04, 2008
McCain warned yesterday that Obama's policies would create chaos in the Middle East.Next up, Isiah Thomas warns that Walsh and D'Antoni will make the Knicks a loser.

Posted on June 04, 2008
Although my month in Singapore and Vietnam looms, I have begun the first of what I hope will be two articles this summer (probably extending into the fall). Working title: "The Long-Term U.S. Fiscal Gap: Is the Main Problem Generational Inequity?"Short answer: no, since it is so hard to specify the optimal generational policy...

Without a cellphone (!!)

Posted on June 03, 2008
I feel as if I have left the 21st century and plunged back into the earlier dark ages. My cellphone broke after many years, and rather than buy a new one (or commit to a two-year plan so I could get one for free) I've decided to get an iPhone.But what with the pervasive rumors that the new generation iPhone will be out as soon as next week, along with the fact that I am about to leave the country for a month (Singapore followed by Vietnam) and thus couldn't use a cellphone without hefty roaming charges anyway, I decided just to cancel my prior service and sit tight, waiting for July...

Mankiw versus DeLong

Posted on June 02, 2008
In Sunday's NY Times, Greg Mankiw had a column calling for a cut in the U.S. corporate tax rate. as per McCain's campaign platform, but with the important difference that Mankiw wants to finance it (assuming it's not providentially in Laffer territory) by increasing the gas tax...

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Reverse spin?

Posted on June 02, 2008
The noise machine message about Scott McClellan's memoir is that he sounds like a left-wing blogger (Karl Rove when it first hit the papers), or that it sounds like a Democrat wrote it (Robert Novak in today's Washington Post).Another way of saying the same thing would be that a Bush insider has written a memoir confirming the accuracy of the Democrats' and left-wing bloggers' view of the Bush Administration.

Is there anything McCain actually DOES know about Iraq?

Posted on May 30, 2008
I'm trying to avoid political rants outside my main areas of professional knowledge, but I am really starting to wonder about the old duffer.We've already seen (from several statements) that he doesn't appear to know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites...

Ferdinand the Bull

Posted on May 27, 2008
Many of those with young (or formerly young) children will remember the delightful children's tale of Ferdinand the Bull, who looked fierce but was useless for bullfighting because he just wanted to lie around sniffing the flowers. I was reminded of him by Shadow, our senior cat, when we were out at the country this weekend...

Huge sigh of relief

Posted on May 20, 2008
With three weeks to spare before I head to Singapore for two weeks of teaching followed by two weeks of touring in Vietnam (mainly Sapa, Halong Bay, and Hoi An), I have finished a first draft of my forthcoming book for the Urban Institute Press, The U...

Press interview

Posted on May 20, 2008
I was interviewed earlier today by a reporter for an on-line financial publication concerning my proposal for partial adjustment of publicly traded companies' taxable income towards their financial accounting income. He had gotten the lead from my talk to the National Tax Association the other day...

Optimal income taxation and the NBA draft lottery

Posted on May 20, 2008
This evening's NBA draft lottery reminds me that the lottery is a redistributive instrument balancing efficiency against distributive goals in much the same manner as the optimal income tax (OIT) in the public economics literature pioneered by Nobel economist James Mirrlees...

National Tax Assocation session in Washington

Posted on May 16, 2008
Yesterday I presented my tax and accounting paper at the NTA?s annual spring meeting in Washington. This involved racing through my perhaps 30 minutes worth of Power Point slides in only 20 minutes (I didn?t have time to shorten them). Lillian Mills of the University of Texas was my commentator...

Oops, rounding error

Posted on May 14, 2008
Stan Collender reminds us that Bush in 2000 promised to eliminate the national debt by the end of this decade. �Instead, it is more than $9.3 trillion and rising by $1.59 billion per day.On a par with his other achievements.

Joint Committee on Taxation addresses tax expenditure analysis

Posted on May 14, 2008
This past Monday, the JCT issued a pamphlet taking on an important conceptual issue, tax expenditure analysis, and making what I think are significant strides in how to rescue the analysis, and its important informational content, from sterile debates about what constitutes a "normal" tax base...

Release of candidates' spouses' tax returns

Posted on May 08, 2008
Cindy McCain is refusing to release her separately-filed tax returns as part of the disclosure process generally demanded in a Presidential campaign. In 2004, Teresa Heinz Kerry similarly refused to release her returns for most of the campaign, although on October 16 of that year she released the front two pages of her 2003 tax return...

Hillary's next move

Posted on May 05, 2008
She is truly emerging as one of Wellesley's and Yale Law School's great "anti-elitists." I'm expecting her to denounce the theory of evolution any day now. If the U.S. had more Islamic than anti-Islamic voters, no doubt she would call for restoring the veil...

Back from Israel

Posted on May 05, 2008
I am back from a very pleasant week in Israel, jet-lagged after a 6 hour plane delay that kept me in the Ben Gurion Airport from 9 pm to 5:30 am, but more or less functioning.More on this in a day or so.

Drinking the kool-aid

Posted on April 25, 2008
The McCain campaign has been arguing that their proposal to allow companies to expense equipment purchases in the first year of use would come at no added budgetary cost. See, for example, here.I am told that Doug Holtz-Eakin has been making this argument to reporters and at various public forums...

Final NYU Tax Policy Colloquium of 2008

Posted on April 24, 2008
Today Jason Furman presented a paper on healthcare, rightly (I'd say) lambasting the bizarre Cogan-Hubbard-Kessler plan to combat moral hazard in healthcare by increasing it, and proposing his own plan which is hardly bullet-proof (and presumably unenactable) yet has some clear virtues...

Free gas for everyone throughout the Labor Day weekend!!

Posted on April 22, 2008
Now that Hillary Clinton has jumped on the McCain bandwagon with regard to suspending the gasoline tax, I think it's time to up the ante.Why stop at merely eliminating the tax? Zero is so arbitrary as a floor. We could get even more financial relief to Americans during the vacation season, and even more fiscal stimulus, by adopting a gasoline subsidy...

Heads up for Tax Notes readers

Posted on April 21, 2008
My Senate Finance testimony from last Tuesday (April 15) appeared today in print at 119 Tax Notes 313 (April 21, 2008). Non-subscribers can still read my testimony here.

Where did the shame go?

Posted on April 20, 2008
I've always respected economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who is McCain's top economics adviser other than the public faces whom I fervently hope are just window-dressing, such as Phil Gramm and Jack Kemp. Holtz-Eakin is almost the only academic or policy intellectual (apart from Jack Goldsmith) to have a prominent Republican-appointed job in George W...

Another new publication

Posted on April 17, 2008
Yet another article that I wrote for a conference a couple of years ago is now on the verge of coming out. In "Simplifying Assumptions: How Might the Politics of Consumption Tax Reform Affect (Impair) the End Product?" I try to examine the political economy scenarios that would be necessary for a consumption tax to be enacted replacing the current income tax...

NYU Tax Policy Colloquium on David Gamage's Optimal Tax Theory Meets Tax Avoidance

Posted on April 17, 2008
I guess I've been doing these colloquium sessions for long enough now that, at some level of generality, nearly everything I encounter has happened before. �The genre for today's session, which happens at least every other year or so (maybe more), was being initially really irked by a paper, leading to skirmishing at lunch (today, including eye-rolling by all 3 of us), followed by a turn for the better after hammering it out...

The real tax policy significance of Paris Hilton

Posted on April 16, 2008
Having seen her on one of the big TV screens in the health club when I was working out this morning, I'm reminded of how I think her symbolic significance to tax policy debates is sometimes (to my taste at least) misstated.Proponents of estate or inheritance taxation sometimes see her as the poster child for their position in the debate...

Another musical note

Posted on April 16, 2008
Some time ago I purchased CD 1 of the 3-CD "69 Love Songs" by the Magnetic Fields (aka NYC songwriter Stephin Merritt plus associated musicians). It didn't quite take, but earlier this year I purchased their/his latest, "Distortion," which is a stylistic homage to the Jesus and Mary Chain that I preferred to the original...

Really stupid tax policy ideas

Posted on April 16, 2008
McCain's proposal to suspend the gas tax for the summer (but who knows if it would ever really come back?) deserves some sort of prize. That one is going to be hard to top.

Senate Finance Committee testimony

Posted on April 15, 2008
Today (April 15, natch) was the day. Here is the link to my full written testimony. The three main points I covered were base-broadening, rationalizing business taxation, and filing and compliance simplification for lower and middle class taxpayers...

James Banks and Peter Diamond weigh in on the income vs. consumption tax debate

Posted on April 14, 2008
Economists James Banks of University College, London, and the renowned Peter Diamond of MIT have posted a new paper, called "The Base for Direct Taxation."The abstract says in part:"The essay presents the Atkinson-Stiglitz and Chamley-Judd results that capital income should not be taxed, but concludes that the required conditions are too restrictive and not robust enough for policy purposes...

Tax filing

Posted on April 14, 2008
I'm done, but I didn't make it under the wire by very much. I use Turbo Tax, as doing it by hand would be intolerable (think of the AMT alone, or for that matter leaving one item out of adjusted gross income and then, once one finds it, having to do umpteen calculations all over again)...

Official witness list for my Senate Finance testimony next week

Posted on April 11, 2008
The panel, meeting on Tuesday, April 15, at 10 a.m. in room 215 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, has the title "Tax: Fundamentals in Advance of Reform." The witness list (order as given in the listing I saw), is as follows:Daniel N. Shaviro, Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation, New York University School of Law, New York, NYMichael Graetz, Justus S...

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