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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

Not to be obsessive but ...

Posted on April 09, 2010
Getting It is currently up to #42,372 among books on Amazon. But in the course of a week it goes up and down like a jet-powered clown on a trampoline.

Posted on April 09, 2010
Students in my Tax Policy Colloquium sometimes join our dinner group after the sessions. Three who are considering coming were thinking of coordinating to come as a group. When I asked why (not that there's anything either wrong or surprising about that), I was told that, to the solo attendee in a significantly younger age group, the likes of me can seem intimidating...

Tax Policy Colloquium on Joel Slemrod's Buenas Notches

Posted on April 09, 2010
This delightfully playful and whimsical paper formed the basis for a fun and interesting discussion at the colloquium today. A notch (the paper's topic) in the narrow sense arises when a tax or other fiscal system features gives rise to a discontinuous jump in taxes or transfers at a given point as the quantity of something (such as income) rises...

More cheap self-promotion

Posted on April 05, 2010
You know what they say (at least in the old Avis commercials) - If you're # 2, it must mean that you try harder.

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Reader comment on Getting It

Posted on April 05, 2010
I couldn't resist disseminating (with permission) comments I got over the weekend from a Getting It reader. He's a childhood friend, but one with whom I've only been sporadically in touch over the last few decades. Anyway, here goes:"If someone had told me last week that you were going to cause me to have a great weekend, I would immediately have dispatched them to the nearest psychiatric center...

Tax policy colloquium on Markle & Shackelford, Cross-Country Comparisons of Corporate Income Taxes

Posted on April 05, 2010
At last Thursday's colloquium, Doug Shackelford presented a paper that uses extensive worldwide financial accounting data to look at how multinational entities (MNEs) are taxed around the world, compared to each other based on where they "reside" and invest, and compared to non-multinational public corporations...

Exciting contest

Posted on April 02, 2010
Maybe you'd have to be me to find this exciting. But the horse race is on at amazon.com between my two most recent, rather substantially different, publications:1) Decoding the Corporate Tax, currently ranked # 426,062 in Books, and2) Getting It, currently ranked # 445,077, but more likely (as a very recent publication) still to be headed up...

One reason tax expenditure analysis still matters (at least conceptually)

Posted on April 02, 2010
I hadn't yet discussed here the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium held on March 25, at which Robert Peroni presented his paper (co-authored with Clifton Fleming) "Can Tax Expenditure Analysis Be Divorced From a Normative Tax Base?: A Critique of the ?New Paradigm? and Its Denouement...

It's nice to be missed

Posted on March 28, 2010
"Wait a second, where is he? He's supposed to be on the bed."Taken while I was in Vienna.Extra credit if you can spot (most of) Seymour in addition to Ursula.

On-line interview

Posted on March 26, 2010
The Bizy Moms website, which is devoted to helping mothers who work out of the home "because moms deserve the best!," recently contacted me to suggest an interview on their blog concerning tax and budget policy, etc. My characteristically cheerful responses to their questions about the U...

The flap over AEI's firing of David Frum

Posted on March 26, 2010
I don't know Frum personally, and he's not in my field. But two reasons to wade briefly into this scrum are (a) I've spent some time at AEI, though not much recently, and (b) I have some familiarity with the people involved in the subsidiary scrum, relating to Bruce Bartlett's assertion that Frum told him AEI was muzzling its healthcare scholars because they were too supportive, for its politically directed tastes, of the Obama healthcare plan...

My very trivial turn at "standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!'"

Posted on March 25, 2010
Old William F. Buckley quote, of course. I thought of it recently in the very trivial setting of what name one attaches to the canonical "economic income" definition. It used to be called "Haig-Simons income." But there's been a recent tendency in the literature to call it, instead, "Schanz-Haig-Simons income...

The healthcare bill's mandate to buy health insurance

Posted on March 24, 2010
By now there's been clear coverage of the fact that requiring the purchase of health insurance coverage is historically a Republican idea. But leaving that ad hominem point aside, is there any reason actually to object to it?The above article contains one important discussion point, from Mitt Romney before he became a laughing stock:"'Some of my libertarian friends balk at what looks like an individual mandate,' Romney wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2006...

Getting It now available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble

Posted on March 22, 2010
My novel, Getting It, is now available, not only via the iUniverse website (click here), but also via Amazon and bn.com.The best price is at bn.com, where there's a member discount and it qualifies for free shipping even if you don't get anything else...

Tax conference in Vienna

Posted on March 22, 2010
I'm just back from a whirlwind trip to Vienna (about 75 hours on the ground there), where I attended a conference, "Tax Treaties from a Legal and Economic Perspective," that was run by Michael Lang's Institute for Austrian and International Tax Law and the Vienna University of Economics and Business...

Tax policy colloquium on David Weisbach's "Trade and Carbon Taxes"

Posted on March 16, 2010
Good session last Thursday even though David's paper, being primarily empirical (concerning effects of carbon taxes on global emissions under different scenarios, based on a computable general equilibrium model of the world economy) was not entirely tailor-made for our format...

"Free Preview" of Getting It

Posted on March 12, 2010
Here is the "Free Preview" of Getting It, which (again) you can purchase right here.1. The Legions of HateAt the well-appointed offices of Ashby & Cinders, Peter Crossley, the partner who had been rather casually appointed to handle the new Barlow matter, was waiting for his subordinates...

Upcoming talks

Posted on March 12, 2010
Evidently unable to sit still (or eager not to put to waste my recent passport renewal), I've apparently arranged or agreed to the following academic speech & travel schedule over the next few months:March 20 - discuss my foreign tax credit paper at a conference in Vienna sponsored by the Tax Institute for Austrian and International Tax Law (along with the Austrian branch of the International Fiscal Association)...

Nie ma alternatywy dla podwyzszenia podatkow!

Posted on March 11, 2010
I believe that's Polish for "There is no alternative to raising taxes." It's the headline of my interview in the Polish magazine Wprost, concerning long-term budget and sustainability problems in lots of countries around the world, available in its Polish translation here...

Fiscally reckless extension of expiring tax cuts

Posted on March 09, 2010
The Obama Administration's budget proposal for fiscal year 2011 includes proposals to extend permanently a number of tax cuts that were adopted in 2001 and 2003 - extending just about everything major from those Bush Administration enactments, if I recall correctly, other than their elimination of the 36% and 39...

Getting It - now available from iUniverse

Posted on March 09, 2010
My satirical novel, Getting It, has gone live on the iUniverse website, and is now available for purchase. Price is $14.95, not including shipping. It should be up soon on Amazon and bn.com, which presumably would affect shipping charges.The link is right here...

Publication updates

Posted on March 08, 2010
My novel should be publicly available very shortly, and I've submitted my foreign tax credit article to a handful of leading law reviews (though I have alternative publication plans if, ahem, they are all too benighted to accept it).

"Spending" cap

Posted on March 07, 2010
GOP Congressmen Jeb Hensarling and Mike Pence have a WSJ op-ed calling for a constitutional amendment "limit[ing] spending to one-fifth of the economy (our historical spending average since World War II). The limit could only be waived by a declaration of war or by a two-thirds congressional vote...

NYU Tax Policy Colloquium of March 4, 2010

Posted on March 05, 2010
Yesterday, Rebecca Kysar presented her paper, Lasting Legislation. In large part, this paper responds to George Yin's paper (presented at a past NYU colloquium) arguing that the widely reviled sunsets of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were actually a good thing...

What's so great about cats?

Posted on March 03, 2010
That isn't a question I would ever ask - it's too self-evident to me, down much deeper than the level where you have words. But a skeptical colleague asked me it the other day, before elaborating with the usual non-cat owner's line about how they don't really care about you, it's just about food, etc...

Women's tennis at Madison Square Garden

Posted on March 02, 2010
Good exhibition tennis matches in Madison Square Garden last night. Clijsters beat Ivanovic and Venus Williams beat Kuznetsova in close 1-setters, then Venus over Clijsters in a close, back & forth, 3-set final, all viewed by us from pretty good seats...

Pet or meat?

Posted on February 24, 2010
Not clear what we would do with Anchiornis huxleyi if this chicken-sized, feathered, non-flying dinosaur (in the carnivorous troodon family) lived today, rather than 150 million years ago. Handsome fella, though, and (if small enough) I'm sure my cats would love to meet one.

Wyden-Gregg tax reform proposal

Posted on February 24, 2010
Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) have introduced the "Bipartisan Tax Fairness and Simplification Act of 2010" (summarized here). They deserve a degree of praise for even trying this. But I suppose it's my job to examine the details critically without extending sympathy points for their need to keep in mind political feasibility issues...

Far be it from me to defend Thomas Friedman, but ...

Posted on February 23, 2010
While I find Friedman unreadable in style and uninteresting in substance, not to mention lacking in real knowledge of much that he discusses, this time around perhaps he deserves at least a halfhearted defense.A recent Dean Baker blog post goes as follows:"Thomas Friedman Competes for the Nobel in Ignorance"Thomas Friedman told readers that: "But now it feels as if we are entering a new era, 'where the great task of government and of leadership is going to be about taking things away from people,' said the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum...

Death of Al Haig

Posted on February 20, 2010
The old warhorse Al Haig, effectively Deputy President for Nixon's last year, then Reagan's first Secretary of State who got himself in trouble by rushing in front of the TV cameras to assert that he was "in control" at the White House in the aftermath of the 1981 Reagan shooting, has just died...

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