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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

The real problem with Twitter

Posted on March 31, 2009
To do it right takes too long. How can you be interesting, fun, & worth reading in only 140 characters without taking all day? (time?s up)

Tax policy colloquium on Emmanuel Saez's "Details Matter"

Posted on March 31, 2009
Last Thursday, we started our post-spring break Tax Policy Colloquium final stretch run with Emmanuel Saez's "Details Matter: The Impact of Presentation and Information on the Take-Up of Financial Incentives for Retirement Saving." The paper analyzes a large-scale real world field experiment with H&R Block in St...

Payback from China continues

Posted on March 24, 2009
The head of China's central bank is now calling for the dollar to be dethroned as the world's reserve currency and replaced by a new IMF-controlled benchmark.I doubt anything will come of this right away, and if I were the Chinese I might not even want immediate adoption of this proposal (which could devalue their vast dollar holdings), but this may well be the way we are headed...

Reasons to visit Washington

Posted on March 23, 2009
My family went site-seeing in Washington D.C. while I was going to a conference at the Washington University in St. Louis. Conceptual togetherness even when apart? They returned with this lovely photo, which they rightly surmised that I would enjoy...

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Are Chicago economists deaf, dumb, and blind? (One of these three especially)

Posted on March 21, 2009
Economists' debates about whether Keynesian stimulus can work are outside my core area of professional expertise, but I do feel that I know something about the issues.For that reason, courtesy of a recent blog entry by Brad DeLong, I couldn't help commenting how laughable it is that U of Chicago Business School economist John Cochrane apparently believes that the principle of Ricardian equivalence helps prove that Keynesian stimulus necessarily must be ineffective...

Washington University Law School budget conference

Posted on March 21, 2009
I am sitting in a hotel lounge (better-appointed than the available ones at the airport) waiting for the departure time of a flight out of St. Louis, where I just spent the last two days at a budget conference organized by Cheryl Block of WULS. Lots of interesting sessions, on topics ranging from automatic budgetary changes (such as entitlements cuts) to restore fiscal sustainability, to how the Presidential and legislative budget processes do and should function (e...

AIG bonus update

Posted on March 21, 2009
I now feel a bit more knowledgeable about the AIG bonus situation than the last time I posted about it, so here are some follow-up thoughts:1) Words sure matter. If they hadn't called these things "bonuses," obviously no trouble. The underlying situation seems to have been as follows...

How did people understand the brain before computers?

Posted on March 18, 2009
On the tennis court recently, I had been playing very well, then I lost my strokes and floundered horribly for a couple of sessions, then I was able to find them again and played very well this week.The analogy that seems utterly compelling to me is that of a computer file somewhere in your system that you need to locate and access quickly in order to run a particular program in real time...

AIG bonus tax

Posted on March 17, 2009
I was angered by the AIG bonuses. Sure, it's a bit of a pop symbolism issue, but I found it odious that these Typhoid Marys of finance - who ought to be unemployable for life, other than asking if you want fries with that, after all that they've done to their shareholders and the world economy - should get all those million dollar bonuses out of federal money, supposedly so they won't leave, when some already have and the rest probably should...

Tax policy colloquium on David Duff's "Tax Fairness and the Tax Mix"

Posted on March 13, 2009
Yesterday we had our ninth session of the year, and last before spring break, discussing the above article by David Duff, who has long been at the University of Toronto Law School but is moving to the University of British Columbia Law School, in Vancouver...

We may have waited too long to clone Shadow ...

Posted on March 13, 2009
Followers of my cats will be glad to hear that Ursula, knock on wood, is doing a lot better. She's overcome her kidney infection and now just needs a couple of water shots a week. She's silky and active as ever, and has a better appetite than she's had for months if not years...

This is how it starts

Posted on March 13, 2009
Alternative title: "Well, duh."From the New York Times:"The Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, spoke in unusually blunt terms on Friday about the 'safety' of China?s $1 trillion investment in American government debt, the world?s largest such holding, and urged the Obama administration to offer assurances that the securities would maintain their value...

Should the U.S. restate past years' GDP?

Posted on March 11, 2009
At one point during my book session at the Urban Institute today, I made the comment that, just as the SEC sometimes makes companies restate past years? income which turns out to have been partly sham, so maybe the U.S. should have to restate GDP for the last few years...

Urban Institute event on Decoding the Corporate Tax

Posted on March 11, 2009
This morning, I attended a book event at the Urban Institute discussing my corporate tax book. Good crowd, maybe about 80 people, apparently plus a webcast audience. My PowerPoint slides for my portion of the event are available here.Greg Ip of the Economist was the moderator, and the discussants were Rosanne Altshuler of Urban/Rutgers Economics, Dan Halperin of Harvard Law School, and Pam Olson of Skadden Arps (formerly Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Policy)...

Tax policy colloquium on Michael Doran's "Managers, Shareholders, and the Double Corporate Tax"

Posted on March 06, 2009
Yesterday's discussion returned to more traditional law school tax policy fare, concerning corporate integration and the Bush Administration's partly failed 2003 attempt to accomplish it via dividend exemption. Michael's thesis in his paper is that the political economy story developed in prior work, such as the well-known article by Jennifer Arlen and Deborah Weiss, needs to be revised...

Amazon availability

Posted on March 04, 2009

Tax policy colloquium on Leslie McCall's "Americans' Social Policy Preferences in the Era of Rising Inequality."

Posted on March 03, 2009

Paging Walter Blum

Posted on March 03, 2009

Some quick preliminary thoughts on President Obama's federal budget

Posted on February 27, 2009

The recession hits home

Posted on February 27, 2009

Upcoming D.C. panel on "Decoding the Corporate Tax"

Posted on February 26, 2009
Here is a link for a forthcoming event in Washington, D.C., at the Urban Institute (2100 M Street) on Wednesday, March 11, from 9:00 to 10:30 am, discussing my new book on corporate taxation.Official description of the event is as follows:Significant reform of the U...

AEI session on Viard (ed.), Tax Policy: Lessons from the 2000s

Posted on February 25, 2009
This morning I appeared as a discussant at an AEI book panel in Washington, concerning the above book. I offered comments on 3 excellent papers, by (1) Alan Viard and John Diamond concerning unfinanced tax cuts, (2) Dhammika Dharmalapa concerning the 2003 dividend tax cuts, and (3) Alan Auerbach and Kevin Hassett concerning the dividend tax cuts and bonus depreciation...

U.S. fiscal situation

Posted on February 25, 2009
Having found the time to read the Auerbach-Gale fiscal gap paper more carefully than when I recently posted about it, the following points seem especially pertinent:(1) We have a really huge fiscal sustainability problem that the financial crisis has made significantly worse, but that the stimulus legislation, if its provisions generally expire in a couple of years as expected, affects only slightly...

Interview concerning my new book

Posted on February 25, 2009
A brief NYU interview concerning my new book, Decoding the Corporate Tax, is now available here.

But seriously folks

Posted on February 24, 2009
The busier you are, the more you need to waste time. Today, facing numerous pressing tasks, I started from a link at aldaily.com and found my way to an ancient Greek joke book, the oldest known & extant one, which actually can be read on-line here.Samples of ancient Greek humor, which certainly ought to make us feel better about our own comic tradition, include the following:An Abderite saw a eunuch talking to a woman and asked if she was his wife...

Upcoming appearances

Posted on February 23, 2009
I was just interviewed regarding my new book Decoding the Corporate Income Tax for the NYU Law website. I'll post the link when it's up.This Wednesday, I'll be at the American Enterprise Institute for a book panel from 9:00 to 10:30 concerning their newly published paper collection, Alan Viard (ed...

Gov. Bobby Jindal's family values

Posted on February 23, 2009
One is hardly surprised by Governor Jindal's eagerness to position himself for the 2012 Republican nomination contest by showily turning down a tiny piece of the stimulus funding. But it's sobering to think that there will likely be children going to bed hungry because he decided to grandstand with regard to unemployment benefits.

Musical and literary update

Posted on February 22, 2009
I've been listening lately to Amy Rigby (among lots of other things), having come across reviews of her new album with Wreckless Eric, which I still don't have (though it's attractively priced as an Amazon mp3 download). Sampling her older stuff, initially I had to get past the fact that stylistically it really isn't anything new - Dylan '66/Byrds folk-rock and late-70s powerpop are among the obvious influences...

Tax policy colloquium on Yoram Margalioth's "Employing Statistical Stigma as a Welfare Ordeal"

Posted on February 21, 2009
Last Thursday, we discussed Yoram Margalioth's "Employing Statistical Stigma as a Welfare Ordeal." In the welfare literature, stigma, leading to low take-up of benefits by eligible individuals, has been viewed as purely a bad thing, to be minimized, not only because it inflicts a bad experience on benefit claimants but because it discourages claiming by intended beneficiaries...

Bad weather ahead

Posted on February 20, 2009
From the abstract of the new Auerbach-Gale article, The Economic Crisis and the Fiscal Crisis: 2009 and Beyond:"In 2009, the federal deficit will be larger as a share of the economy than at any time since World War II. The current deficit is due in part to economic weakness and the stimulus, and in part to policy choices made in the past...

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