Start Making Sense: Taxation & Estate Planning

Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Taxation & Estate Planning Blogs

OR PHONE (866) 635-1838 for Bankruptcy Help, (866) 635-6190 for Divorce,
(866) 635-2689 for Personal Injury or (866) 635-9402 for Criminal Defense

Find a Local Lawyer

Bankruptcy (866) 635-1838
Divorce (866) 635-6190
Personal Injury (866) 635-2689
Criminal Defense (866) 635-9402

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

A step towards more honest budgetary accounting

Posted on February 20, 2009
The Obama Administration deserves generous plaudits and hosannas for this.

2-9/10 cheers for flu shots

Posted on February 20, 2009
I got one last fall. Late last week, I suddenly felt what seemed to be a cold coming on. Then it turned into a couple of days of wipeout, with low fever but well short of the three-alarm job I remember from 9 years ago. Given the relative mildness, I was wondering if it was actually a bad cold rather than the flu, since one really expects a bit more from the latter (pounding headaches, dizziness, loss of appetite, weeks of exhaustion, etcetera)...

Institutional Foundations of Hackery

Posted on February 20, 2009
The blog post title above is a backhand reference to the title of my recently published book, Institutional Foundations of Public Finance, co-edited with Alan Auerbach, and collecting the excellent papers from a 2006 conference at NYU Law School in honor of David Bradford...

Tax policy colloquium on Dorothy Brown's "Shades of the American Dream"

Posted on February 13, 2009
Yesterday we had a lively session, terminated by the clock when it was still going strong, on Dorothy Brown's "Shades of the American Dream."The paper argues that the income tax rules for homeowners (exclude imputed rent, allow mortgage interest and real property deductions, disallow losses on sale but also exclude most gains) unfairly disadvantage African-Americans, who take less advantage of the rules than whites...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

My two favorite cartoons concerning the stimulus battle

Posted on February 10, 2009
One is by David Horsey, and the other is by Ed Stein.

My latest book is now available

Posted on February 10, 2009
My latest book, Decoding the Corporate Tax, is now available here on the Urban Institute Press website.Not to lay it on too thick, but the cover blurbs are as follows. From David Weisbach: "Decoding the U.S. Corporate Tax is a concise and clearly written review of the corporate tax structure and its economic and distributional consequences...

Tax policy colloquium on Amy Finkelstein's ?EZ-Tax: Tax Salience and Tax Rates?

Posted on February 09, 2009
Last Thursday, we discussed Amy Finkelstein's very interesting above-named article, which shows that adoption of EZ-Pass appears to lead to higher tolls, as well as to reduced consumer elasticity of response to the tolls, because not paying cash at the tollbooth reduces one's awareness of the charge...

Hypocrisy?

Posted on February 08, 2009
After complaining about ineffective stimulus or non-stimulus proposals in the House bill, the Senate has not only eliminated some of the most unambiguously effective stuff, such as $40 billion to head off state and local government spending cuts (by definition "shovel-ready") - it has also put in a $70 billion alternative minimum tax (AMT) patch for 2009...

Sad news

Posted on February 04, 2009
This made me quite sad. I didn't know him personally, and never bought one of his fabled peelers, but he was a riotous and delightful presence at the Union Square Greenmarket, which I haunt so incessantly during the summer and fall months (mainly for fresh fruit) that I'm worried they'll start charging me rent.

AALS call for papers on property & tax law intersections

Posted on February 03, 2009
Nancy Staudt of Northwestern Law School, an old friend who happens to have been the second-ever presenter at the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium (way back in January 1996), asked me to post the following item:CALL FOR PAPERSThe Property and Taxation Sections of the AALS are seeking to co-sponsor a half day session at the annual AALS meeting next year (January, 2010) in New Orleans...

Glamorous 5:30 am slot

Posted on February 02, 2009
I just did a 3 or 4-minute live radio slot on KCBS out of San Francisco, concerning the alternative minimum tax (AMT) patch in the Senate stimulus bill. Time of the appearance was a humane 8:30 am here in the East Coast, but as it was 5:30 am in the broadcast area I doubt there were all that many millions of listeners...

New York Times on-line forum on Geithner's and Daschle's tax problems

Posted on February 02, 2009
I was invited today to participate in an on-line New York Times forum concerning Geithner's and Daschle's tax problems. As you can see if you go there, the participant responses had a range that would do the movie Rashomon proud, ranging from "No Moral Turpitude" to "Fundamentally Corrupt...

Tax policy colloquium with Ed Kleinbard on the JCT's tax expenditures pamphlet

Posted on January 30, 2009
Yesterday we had our third session of the year, with Ed Kleinbard (Chief of Staff at the Joint Committee on Taxation) concerning the recent JCT pamphlet(s) on tax expenditure analysis.This is a topic I've written and thought about a lot, such as in Rethinking Tax Expenditures and Fiscal Language, 57 Tax Law Review 187 (2004) (draft version available here), reworked (and shortened) as chapter 8 of my recent book Taxes, Spending, and the U...

So far, so good?

Posted on January 29, 2009
The stimulus bill as it passed the House does, it's true, contain the rule extending carrybacks for NOLs to 5 years. As I discussed here, this is probably a bad idea on balance, although the Tax Policy Center was generous enough to give it a B.But at least the thoroughly silly proposal to reward private equity firms for buying back their debt at a discount instead of boosting employment did not make it into the House bill...

My tax & accounting article comes out

Posted on January 26, 2009
The Georgetown Law Journal has now officially published my article, The Optimal Relationship Between Taxable Income and Financial Accounting Income. Here is the link, and the abstract is as follows: The persistence of the book-tax gap, or excess of companies? reported financial accounting income over their taxable income, suggests that accounting manipulation and tax sheltering remain significant problems, even in the aftermath of the ?Enron era...

Tax policy colloquium on Auerbach's "Understanding U.S. Corporate Tax Losses"

Posted on January 23, 2009
Yesterday, with the help of Bill Gentry (Williams College/Columbia Law School) as guest commentator, we discussed co-convener Alan Auerbach's paper (with Rosanne Altshuler & two Treasury economists), "Understanding U.S. Corporate Tax Losses." The paper analyzes a puzzle: why corporations had so many more tax losses during the relatively mild recession of 2001-02 than during the previous and otherwise comparable recession ten years earlier...

Another tax stimulus proposal

Posted on January 23, 2009
Everett Ehrlich has written a paper on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urging another business tax stimulus measure: permitting companies, for the next two years, to avoid paying tax when they repurchase their debts at a discount. Thus, to use his lead example, suppose a company that owes the banks a dollar gets to buy back the debt for only 75 cents...

Changing of the guard

Posted on January 20, 2009
Any regular reader of this blog will know how immensely relieved I am that, at long last, the odious Bush Administration has ended. Most of you probably share this feeling, though I'd hope to have at least a few readers from across the spectrum.I have a sufficiently oppositional personality that I have come to feel, at a minimum, cynical and sarcastic (and often more than that) regarding every Administration since Johnson...

Happiest word in the English language

Posted on January 20, 2009
"Ex," when placed with a dash in front of the words "President George W. Bush."I smiled when I saw this word today.

Matt Taibbi nails Thomas Friedman to the floor once again

Posted on January 17, 2009
To me, Friedman is so drearily unreadable that, despite subscribing to the Times plus frequently reading it on-line, I need bloggers to tell me what he actually says. Thank goodness for Matt Taibbi (print journalist but available on-line), whose review of Friedman's latest admittedly falls just a smidgen short of his all-time classic review of The World is Flat, which I linked when it came out and am happy to link once again.

First NYU Tax Policy Colloquium session

Posted on January 16, 2009
Yesterday was day 1 of the spring (can I call it that when it's 10 degrees outside?) 2009 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium. In the public afternoon session (we also meet with students in the AM), we covered my forthcoming paper, The Long-Term Fiscal Gap: Is the Main Problem Generational Inequity? I hope it's not terrible of me to say: I really do like this paper...

Get well soon

Posted on January 13, 2009
Ursula, the lovely little creature shown here in two views, stopped eating and drinking late last week, evidently feeling very sick, and she got severely dehydrated. We had to bring her to the veterinary hospital, where she has been getting IV fluids for the last few days...

Out with the old, in with the new

Posted on January 12, 2009
My Tax I students from last semester will probably be glad to hear that I have submitted my grades. I am even gladder to reflect on the closely associated fact that I have finished grading their exams.Grading exams is by far the worst part of a law prof's work - nothing else is even close...

Bush economic policy post-mortems

Posted on January 12, 2009
From today's Washington Post, here are Bush's very best economic reviews, coming as they do from people on the conservative / Republican side.From former McCain economic adviser: Doug Holtz-Eakin: "The expansion was a continuation of the way the U.S...

Health club morons

Posted on January 09, 2009
Here's the sort of thing that ruffles my otherwise sunny disposition.My health club is always crowded in early January - the marginal attendees either are working off their holiday weight or else haven't abandoned their New Year's resolutions yet. There is a particular type of elliptical machine I favor, and 4 of the 5 were in use when I got there this morning...

Obama's proposal to extend the carryback for NOLs

Posted on January 07, 2009
I have mixed feelings about this part of Obama's proposed stimulus package. On the one hand, if not for pervasive income mismeasurement by the tax system it would be madness not to treat losses as fully refundable. Otherwise, one discourages risk-bearing (since the government in effect says "heads we win, tails you lose") and offers inefficient incentives for corporate conglomerates (so one activity's losses can be deducted against another's gains)...

Life versus the movies

Posted on December 24, 2008
On Christmas Eve we watched the 1951 Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol. Scrooge as portrayed by Sim (pre-redemption) forcefully, unremittingly reminded me of Cheney. But Cheney is both far worse and utterly irredeemable.Someone (me?) should write a satirical Christmas Carol knock-off starring Cheney...

For greater efficiency, eliminate the middleman

Posted on December 23, 2008
I realize I'm repeating myself from a post a couple of years ago, but wouldn't it be more efficient in baseball to eliminate the middleman (the players) by simply permitting the Yankees to purchase wins and championships directly?E.g., it's the bottom of the 9th inning of game 162 with the Red Sox (or better yet the Rays) in new Yankee Stadium...

The cult of home ownership

Posted on December 21, 2008
Good article in today's Times about how the Bush Administraton helped light the fuse under the current economic meltdown by pushing universal home ownership and hence encouraging bad mortgage loans.Needless to say, there's plenty of blame to go around...

What was Madoff doing?

Posted on December 20, 2008
One of the big questions about Madoff's insane scam is how he thought he would get away with it. Ponzi schemes are inherently unstable, and yet there are indications that he was running this one for decades.br /br /I've read nothing in the media really explaining what he was up to, or why he crashed at this point, perhaps because no one knows...

Previous | Next

Related Law Bulletins

Get Your H-1B Cases Ready Now To File On April 1 for October 1, 2007 Start Date
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will begin a...

USCIS Reminds Employers To Start Using New I-9 Form
Yesterday, USCIS issued a reminder to employers about the new I-9 ...

Time to stop making the Dunkin' Donuts
Franchisor Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins have brought suit ag...