Taxation & Estate Planning

Tax policy colloquium session on private equity

Posted on February 08, 2008
Yesterday at week 4 of the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, Chris Sanchirico presented his paper, "The Tax Advantage to Paying Private Equity Funds Managers With Profit Shares: What Is It? Why Is It Bad?"These afternoon meetings follow a morning session with just the students, and then lunch with the speaker to hash things out...

More on the stimulus package - or, does Larry Summers need an economics lesson?

Posted on February 05, 2008
According to Brad DeLong on his blog: "On the phone just now, Larry Summers just moved me appreciably toward enthusiastic support of the stimulus package by arguing, roughly: The big arguments against the stimulus package are two: It will become a destructive lobbyist Christmas treeIt will increase the deficit and yet fail to stimulate the economyWe appear to have dodged the bullet on the first argumentThe second argument is incoherent because: The U...

Early election returns

Posted on February 05, 2008
Not that it will make any difference, but my sense this morning was that Greenwich Village is voting for Obama.

I've watched these ten times in a row, but I'm not done yet

Posted on February 04, 2008
Both the David Tyree catch and the Plaxico Burress TD are available on youtube.  Both stand up to repeated viewing, at least for me.  The former speaks for itself; for the latter the great thing was seeing it unfold - Burress breaking open, the ball in the air, and (in total contrast to the Tyree play) you could tell what was about to happen...

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Budget deficit projections for 2009-2018

Posted on February 04, 2008
Sometimes I think I should publish my novel on-line, since I don't have a non-virtual publisher.  It's funny and a good read.Bush's new budget is also being published only on-line.  It's equally fictional, though a lot less funny and not so good a read...

Tax policy colloquium session on incidence of the corporate tax

Posted on February 04, 2008
Last Thursday, my co-convenor Kevin Hassett presented his paper, "Taxes and Wages," an empirical study suggesting (based on international time series data) that corporate tax rate increases lower manufacturing wages, while corporate tax rate cuts raise wages...

Small bit of good news on the pop music front

Posted on January 30, 2008
According to pitchforkmedia.com, Dennis Wilson's long-unavailable Pacific Ocean Blue is going to be re-released in a couple of months in an expanded version. This is reputedly a weirdly off-kilter lost gem by the Beach Boys' other gifted songwriter, unavailable for years unless one was willing to pay more than $100...

Interesting empirical paper

Posted on January 30, 2008
A new National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, "Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?", by Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna, reaches the interesting conclusion (based on mid-1990s U.S. data) that, at least in the short run, the dominant empirical effect of violent movies goes the other way...

Bush's State of the Union

Posted on January 29, 2008
I didn't watch it - it was just too tempting to have elective root canal surgery instead. Or at least I would have rated that about on a par with watching the speech.That said, but having read about the speech, just a couple of fairly obvious comments...

Tax policy colloquium session on deferred compensation

Posted on January 25, 2008
Yesterday the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium featured a paper by Dan Halperin of Harvard Law School and Ethan Yale of Georgetown Law School concerning deferred compensation and recently enacted Internal Revenue Code section 409A.For a bit of background flavor, this provision responded to one of Enron's more outrageous scams...

Bad stimulus legislation

Posted on January 25, 2008
If it were feasible to enact and enforce a constitutional ban on fiscal stimulus legislation, I would support it. The problem isn't with the theory of fiscal stimulus, but the practice. For extremely good reasons, it became generally accepted orthodoxy by the late 1980s that efforts to do it would almost always be bad...

Too big, too fast, too strong

Posted on January 25, 2008
So what if they're only sixth graders.  My younger son's school basketball team won its opener, 17-4, in 24 fast-paced minutes.

Fiscal stimulus, Rudy-style

Posted on January 22, 2008
Since Rudy asserts that tax cuts always raise revenue, does that mean counter-cyclical fiscal policy, in his world, requires RAISING taxes so as to cut revenues and pump more money into the economy?Just asking.

Inheritance tax pushback

Posted on January 18, 2008
Yesterday we had our first NYU Tax Policy Colloquium of the semester. This is year 13 for me, shockingly enough, meaning I've been doing it for more than a quarter of my life (certainly a strange thought).My co-convenor for the first 7 weeks is Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute...

Redefining tax expenditures

Posted on January 16, 2008
Joint Committee on Taxation chief Ed Kleinbard was recently quoted to the effect that he wants to reshape and revitalize tax expenditure analysis.This is potentially a very good thing. As per a recent article of mine (in the Tax Law Review) and book chapter (in my book Taxes, Spending, and the U...

A Nobel Prize in Economics for Mitt Romney?

Posted on January 16, 2008
Contrary to previously prevailing economic theory, it turns out that Detroit's auto industry can be restored to its 1950s status so long as we (1) replace Washington-style pessimism with optimism, (2) have a President who "fights for every job" (I hope Mitt still gets enough sleep - and who exactly does he fight?), and (3) eliminate fuel efficiency standards...

New achievements in phoniness

Posted on January 15, 2008
Even by his own exalted standards, Romney is outdoing himself with all this talk about personally, as President, rebuilding the traditional auto industry, "fighting for every job" in Michigan, and so forth.

Guilty pleasure

Posted on January 13, 2008
I recently downloaded Tommy James and the Shondells' Crimson and Clover - the album version, of course.Not that I'm proud of myself for this ...

No good economist should support a stimulus bill

Posted on January 11, 2008
Let's think in terms of the actual bill we would get, not the hypothetical bill one might design.  It will be late, a Christmas tree loaded with lobbyists' garbage, larded by both parties since otherwise it wouldn't become law, and full of bad new stuff that will just stay on as the business cycle changes.

Latest Rudy follies

Posted on January 11, 2008
Our boy has apparently decided that the way to get back in the Republican race is to offer the biggest, most pandering tax cut of all. An unnamed fiscal policy expert has been quoted in blogs elsewhere as saying that Rudy's tax cut package is "huge," about 4 percent of GDP, or more than twice the size of the Reagan or Bush tax cuts...

Who's crazier?

Posted on January 10, 2008
Bush says he expects a Mideast peace treaty by the end of his term. Isiah Thomas says the Knicks are headed towards an NBA championship soon, and that all members of his 9-25 team are untouchable.

The Bush Administration pays for the Iraq war!

Posted on January 09, 2008
Jason Furman just sent me the following article from the Congressional Quarterly:CQ TODAY - BUDGET Jan. 9, 2008 - 1:31 p.m. Sparing Trees, Saving Money: The Fiscal 2009 'E-Budget' By David Clarke, CQ Staff There will be no delivery truck pulling up to the White House next month to unload freshly printed copies of President Bush's fiscal 2009 budget proposal, which is likely to total more than 2,000 pages...

Freedom is slavery

Posted on January 04, 2008
The Iowa contests have me watching CNN for a couple of nights, which I don't often do (unbearable fatuousness and vapidity, and that's not even counting the politicians).  But in watching discussion of the Republican race, I was struck (though I've noticed this for a while) about how "fiscal conservative" now means someone who favors huge budget deficits...

2008 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium

Posted on January 04, 2008
The spring semester Tax Policy Colloquium that I have been co-running at NYU since 1996 starts up again on Thursday, January 17, with a 4-6 pm session at Furman Hall, room 120, at NYU Law School. My co-conveners will be Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute for the first seven weeks, and Mihir Desai of the Harvard Business School for the last seven weeks...

Latest reading

Posted on January 04, 2008
After finishing the William Randolph Hearst biography that I noted in an earlier post, I sprinted through two novels, slacker-ironist Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision and dour Ian MacEwan's On Chesil Beach. The latter, though painful, is really good, and makes the former feel in retrospect a bit like amateur hour (though that's too harsh about a largely enjoyable read)...

Good news from Iowa

Posted on January 04, 2008
At least, that's how I see it. On the Democratic side, I just hope Obama (if elected) doesn't actually believe that he can work "together" with Republican revanchists. But perhaps this is to a degree just astute packaging. And I am hoping he will be elected...

Retail sales tax versus value-added tax

Posted on January 03, 2008
Bruce Bartlett argues against the Fair Tax here: http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/files/bartlett_fair_tax.pdfI generally don't bother discussing the Fair Tax, as it appears to be a dead horse both intellectually and politically. Even assuming one wants a flat rate consumption tax with no zero bracket, why use the retail sales tax model instead of a value-added tax (VAT)? The latter can lead to the same overall result but with better enforcement capabilities since the revenue authorities can cross-check rebates against taxes remitted on inter-business transactions, and since it can be embarrassing for a business to claim rebates on purchases without admitting to any sales on items that are no longer observable in inventory...

Shadow forgets the rules again; Buddy gets into the holiday spirit

Posted on December 31, 2007

Shades of O.J.?

Posted on December 27, 2007
Nice to see that Clemens is doing his own investigation of the steroid reports.

The movie versus the book

Posted on December 24, 2007
I recently saw Citizen Kane again, for the first time in quite a few years, to show it to my kids (one of them anyway).  When I then came across a William Randolph Hearst biography on a Christmas shopping foray to a Barnes & Noble, my interest was piqued...

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