MauledAgain

When I was a child I was told, and of course I long since saw actual evidence, that during World War II Americans were encouraged to be very secretive about all sorts of things. “Loose Lips Sink Ships” was one of several slogans that were circulated among citizens. It isn’t difficult to understand why so much information directly and indirectly related to the war effort was kept under wraps, disclosed to few, and in some instances put away until years after the war ended.

Now comes a report that Senators have been promised by the Finance Committee that their tax reform proposals will be kept secret from America for 50 years. Presumably, if tax reform moves forward and proposals make it into publicly disclosed legislation, no one will know which Senator or Senators suggested, pushed for, or sponsored a particular provision in the legislation.

What’s the point of keeping tax reform proposals secret? Are there comparisons to keeping military plans hidden from the enemy? It seems that the reason for the confidentiality promise is to protect Senators from retaliation by their campaign contributors. In other words, the secrecy is to protect the system that now afflicts American politics, namely, the purchase of legislators and the funding of special interest legislative provisions by those wealthy enough, selfish enough, and arrogant enough to do so.

Tax law legislation should reflect what is best for the country. It ought not be the outcome of secret back-room deals between legislators and well-funded lobbyists. It’s “of the people, by the people, for the people,” not “of the people with money, by the people with money, for the people with money.” Instead of hiding things, there ought to be a disclosure of the names of people, corporations, and other entities that obtained existing tax law provisions through moneyed influence. To begin reform of tax law, there first needs to be reform of the tax legislative process.

A recent Tax Court Case, Williams v. Comr., T.C. Summ. Op. 2013-60, demonstrates yet again why it is important to put things in writing in a timely manner. This is a point not unlike the one I have made in other posts, such as In Tax, As in Much Else, Precision Matters.

The taxpayer was an ordained minister who entered into an employment agreement with a church in September 2005. Under the agreement, he became the church’s pastor, and received a salary of $80,000. The agreement also provided that the church would pay the taxpayer a $500 housing allowance for six months. The six month period was subject to an extension if the church’s Deacon Ministry approved. The taxpayer excluded from gross income payments received after the six-month period expired. The IRS issued a notice of deficiency that treated the payments received in 2007 as gross income.

Section 107(2) excludes from gross income “the rental allowance paid to him as part of his compensation, to the extent used by him to rent or provide a home and to the extent such allowance does not exceed the fair rental value of the home, including furnishings and appurtenances such as a garage, plus the cost of utilities.” Under regulations section 1.107-1(b), the rental allowance must be designated before it is paid. The designation can be in the employment agreement, in minutes, in a budget, or in any other instrument that evidences the action.

The taxpayer did not argue that the six-month period had been extended. Instead, the taxpayer provided a second employment agreement dated 2005, but signed by the church and the taxpayer in 2012. The taxpayer argued that the second agreement was intended to clarify the September 2005 agreement because that agreement was a “generic type layout contract” between the parties in which “some of the stuff * * * had not been defined”. The second employment agreement provided for a parsonage allowance that included all costs associated with facilitating proper living facilities. Accordingly, the Tax Court held that the second agreement did not designate rental allowances paid in 2007 because it was not executed until 2012.

It appears that the parties, after realizing that the September 2005 contract lacked the necessary language to trigger the section 107 exclusion for the taxpayer, decided to fix the problem. Unfortunately, the revised contract executed in 2012 was too late to provide the outcome that would have been obtained had the language in the September 2005 contract covered more than six months, had the six-month period been extended before it expired, or if the second agreement had been executed by March 2006 rather than in 2012. Whether the delay was a consequence of procrastination, of a late realization that the September 2005 agreement was inadequate, or both, is unclear, but what is clear that taking tax issues into account needs to be done when drafting contracts rather than after the fact.

Readers of MauledAgain know that I am a harsh critic of the foolish claim that reducing tax rates increases revenue. The chief flaw of that approach is that a reduction of the tax rate to zero demonstrates that rate reduction does not translate to revenue increases. It can translate to revenue elimination. Once the tax cut advocates – whether clamoring for more relief for economically battered upper classes or tax cuts for everyone in a time of war, for example – admit that their “tax rate reductions increase revenue” mantra is nothing more than an electoral ploy, they are stuck defending which tax rate works best. And on that issue, they fare badly.

On Sunday, it became clear that the “reduce tax rates” is just the tip of a bigger flawed policy iceberg. During an interview on CBS News, House Speaker John Boehner let a bit more of the agenda cat out of the bag when responding to an accusatory question. Boehner was asked to describe how he felt about presiding over one of the “least productive” and “least popular Congresses in history.” Boehner’s response was that the Congress “should not be judged by how many new laws we create,” but “ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal.” He claimed that there are “more laws than the administration could ever enforce.”

So it’s clear that the ultimate agenda of those who control the House of Representatives is to eliminate as many laws as possible. The argument that reduction in the number of laws increases law and order runs into the same absurd outcome as does the foolish “tax rate reductions increase revenue” nonsense. If Boehner concedes that zero laws is not ideal, where is the magic number? It’s the same challenge as finding the best tax rate. There is an additional factor, though, because Boehner and his comrades can make it impossible for the administration to enforce any laws, through cutting appropriations for the enforcement of laws and through enacting moratoria on the enforcement of laws. Both are tactics used by Congresses in the past.

There’s a simple reason laws are needed. People are unable to regulate themselves. If every employer took steps to put the health, safety, and welfare of employees above his or her or its profit-seeking efforts, would an OSHA be required? If no one chose to rob a bank, would laws criminalizing bank robbery be needed? If every corporation made certain to refrain from polluting air and water, would the EPA need to exist or be of its existing size?

When opponents of laws and taxes argue that the number of laws has increased during the past however many years, they fail to take into account the fact that the nation’s population has grown during those years. As the population grows, the number of potential events requiring regulation increases. The increase is not proportional to population, but proportional to the number of connections. Adding a person to a population of 300 million adds at least 300 nillion possible opportunities for behavior that require regulation that is not self-generated. Toss in the millions of corporations, LLCs, trusts, estates, partnerships and other non-people entities treated as people, and the amount of economic and personal activity that cries out for regulation grows at exponential rates that challenge the largest computers.

History will judge Boehner and his Congress. It will not award prizes for encouraging pollution, poverty, hunger, gerrymandered electoral districts, voting repression, and concentration of wealth in the elite.

A reader sent along an interesting story about the City of Philadelphia’s assessment of a tax against establishments that provide lap dances. The writer of the story suggests that Philadelphia decided to assess this tax after “[f]ailing to institute hikes on soda and cigarettes.” Though it is true that the city’s attempt to increase the taxes on cigarettes and alcoholic beverages went nowhere, as I described in Taxing Activities or Things That Can Disappear, and its repeated efforts to enact a soda tax also hit a dead-end, as I explained in posts such as What Sort of Tax?, The Return of the Soda Tax Proposal, Tax As a Hate Crime?, Yes for The Proposed User Fee, No for the Proposed Tax, Philadelphia Soda Tax Proposal Shelved, But Will It Return?, Taxing Symptoms Rather Than Problems, It’s Back! The Philadelphia Soda Tax Proposal Returns, The Broccoli and Brussel Sprouts of Taxation, and The Realities of the Soda Tax Policy Debate, it may simply be coincidence that the city has focused on compliance with its amusement tax. Or perhaps it indeed is connected in some way with the inability to collect revenue through cigarette and soda taxes.

An attorney for two of the establishments against which the city is attempting to collect the amusement tax claims that the city’s action is “financial desperation” and constitutes an attempt to “tax the same thing twice.” The attorney explained that the establishments have been paying the amusement tax as required, on “the admission fee or privilege to attend or engage in any amusement.” An unidentified “source close to the matter” explained that the lap dance is “a separate experience” and thus subject to an amusement tax.

If a fee is paid for the lap dance is in addition to the admission fee, then the amusement tax should be computed not only by taking into account admission fees but also by including amounts paid for lap dances, if in fact the lap dance is an amusement. As I told students in the basic income tax class, tax attorneys need to resolve all sorts of issues, many not involving numerical computations, and some of which give tax law practice a level of interest very different from the “tax is boring” mindset of those whose perception of tax practice is limited. Thus, the first issue* that must be decided is whether a lap dance constitutes amusement. Having never had a lap dance, and having never seen one in person, I do not know. I doubt that perceptions gleaned from news reports, documentaries, and movies are dispositive of the question. So I will let readers chime in on their conclusions. I wonder if there are folks who can be called as expert witnesses on the question. If the taxpayers’ challenge to the assessments makes it to trial, it may be worth attending for that aspect alone.

*Another issue is whether the fee paid for the lap dance goes directly to the dancers, who would be liable for the tax if it applied, or whether the fees are turned over to the establishments, which in turn would be responsible. Again, not knowing how the fees are handled precludes resolving the issue until the experts step in.

A recent Tax Court case, Nye v. Comr., T.C. Memo 2013-166, illustrates why document drafters need to pay close attention to what they are drafting, why they ought not expect judges to bail them out, and why understanding basic tax is important for all lawyers and not just the tax practitioners.

The facts are not uncommon. In 1990, John David Nye and Alice C. Nye divorced. The Florida state court’s final judgment dissolved the marriage, and incorporated and attached a separation and property settlement agreement into which the two had entered. That agreement provided that John would pay Alice alimony of $3,600 each month until she remarried or either of them died. It also provided that he would pay rehabilitative alimony of $200 each month for 30 months, also to terminate if Alice remarried or either of them died. The agreement provided that at the earlier of John’s death or the death of both of his parents, he would transfer to Alice title to certain real property in which his parents were then living. The agreement also provided that if Alice decided to purchase a residence within three years of the date of the agreement, John would provide her down payment assistance not to exceed $10,000. The agreement further provided that John would attempt to obtain and would maintain major medical health insurance for Alice, but if she was uninsurable or he could not obtain insurance, he would pay her $150 each month for as long as he was obligated to pay the $3,600 monthly payment.

In 2006, Alice filed for additional alimony and additional medical insurance funds. In 2007, John and Alice entered into a second agreement, in which John agreed to pay Alice $350,000 before March 6, 2008, and in which Alice agreed to quitclaim certain real property to John. The agreement provided that once those transfers had been made, all obligations from John to Alice would terminate. John made the payment, and the state court issued a final judgment incorporating and approving the second agreement.

On their 2008 federal income tax return, John and his then wife claimed an alimony deduction of $350,000. The IRS allowed $3,750 to reflect one month’s payment of $3,600 and $150, and disallowed the other $346,250.

The Tax Court agreed with the IRS. It pointed out that a deduction under section 215 for alimony paid requires that the amount in question qualify as alimony or separate maintenance payments under section 71(a), which also would require the payee to include the payment in gross income. Under section 71(b), a payment does not constitute alimony or separate maintenance payments unless, among other things, the obligation to make the payment does not survive the death of the payee and there is no obligation to make a substitute payment after the payee’s death. The Court first examined the agreement to determine if there was any provision specifying whether the obligation to pay the $350,000 survived the payee’s death, and determined that no such provision existed. The Court accordingly examined Florida law and concluded that under Florida law, as set forth in several cases, including one very similar to the Nye situation, the obligation did survive the payee’s death. Accordingly, the payment did not qualify as alimony or separate maintenance payments, and no deduction was allowable.

The lesson is simple. If the alimony deduction is desired, the payor must persuade the payee not only to agree to the concomitant gross income inclusion for the payee but also to accept the risk of having the payor’s obligation terminated if the payee dies before the payment is made. An offer to increase the payment to compensate the payee for the payee’s income tax liability on the gross income inclusion and to cover the actuarial cost of the death risk might bring about success in the attempt to obtain the payee’s agreement. The agreement signed by both parties ought to reflect what they have agreed to do, and the question of whether the obligation survives the payee’s death should be set forth in the agreement, particularly if state law provides, in the absence of an agreement, for an outcome contrary to what the parties intend.

It is unclear what the parties in this case intended. It is obvious that the payor desired a deduction, but it is unclear whether that desire was communicated to the payee’s attorney by the payor’s attorney. It is unclear whether the issue was discussed. It is unclear whether the issue was considered when the agreement was drafted, and whether the lack of a provision was the consequence of a deliberate decision not to address the issue or the consequence of the issue not being considered at all. The court is not in a position to guess what the parties intended or what they discussed. It is the responsibility of the parties, and their lawyers, to deal with the issue, resolve the issue, and to draft the agreement in accordance with that resolution.

Among the many political decision that I consider foolish, privatization of functions that belong in the public arena is high on the list. Privatization takes control away from taxpayers, and in some instance even the legislators foolish enough to fall for the private sector’s siren song. Privatization increases the cost of services, a cost borne by taxpayers in their role as consumers of the product or service in question. Privatization usually fails to generate increased efficiencies. Privatization puts profits in the pockets of a small, elite segment of the private sector that would not exist but for those elite dipping into the public till. I have explored these concerns in earlier posts, including Are Private Tolls More Efficient Than Public Tolls?, When Privatization Fails: Yet Another Example, and How Privatization Works: It Fails the Taxpayers and Benefits the Private Sector.

Now comes a report that the privatization of the tax refund process in Virginia is yet another kick in the face of ordinary taxpayers, this time in Virginia. Republicans who control Virginia’s legislature, working with the state’s Republican governor, passed and signed a law that required the Department of Taxation to stop issuing refund checks, except in unusual situations, and to replace the checks with debit cards issued by a private sector entity. Accordingly, the Department of Taxation contracted with Xerox Corporation to provide debit cards issued by Comerica Bank, at no cost to the state. However, Xerox was given the right to charge fees in connection with the use of the debit cards.

So how has this privatization move worked out? The simple answer is bad for the taxpayers, good for the folks at Xerox and Comerica.

As explained in this report, taxpayers attempting to transfer their refunds into their bank accounts are being charged $2. When they call to find out why, they are charged $1 per call. Getting through to a live human is almost impossible. Taxpayers who try to dispute fees are charged yet again for calling customer service. One taxpayer, told that the fees would be reversed, called after nothing happened for almost two weeks, and was then charged another fee for making that call. Another taxpayer who tried to use an automated phone system to make the transfer but who cancelled the process when a pre-recorded voice explained that the transfer would take two days, discovered that he nonetheless had been charged for using the automated phone system. When he called again in an attempt to get the fee cancelled, he was “put on hold for 1 hour and 51 minutes before being hung up on.” Some banks refuse to permit cash withdrawals from the debit cards. Banks also are refusing to provide cash withdrawals to taxpayers holding debit cards if the taxpayers do not have accounts with the bank. Apparently, other problems have arisen because the Department of Taxation has referred to efforts to deal with unidentified other issues.

Of course, the Department of Taxation attributes the problems to the challenges of starting up the privatization process. Xerox claimed that there was a problem but that it was unable to fix it quickly. Perhaps Xerox ought to stick to photocopiers and leave the tax refund business to Department of Taxation professionals who aren’t trying to masquerade as photocopier manufacturers. Surely the Department of Taxation is investing more time and resources dealing with the mess than it would have expended had the privatization stunt not been enacted. Comerica refused to comment. I wonder why.

As one frustrated Virginia taxpayer put it, “There certainly isn’t any incentive for the card provider to operate in a just, moral fashion.” But perhaps there are a bunch of $1 and $2 incentives for Virginians to vote out of office the Republicans who have sold out to the segment of the private sector that continues in its attempt to take over the nation.

Mike Razar, at American Thinker suggests, surely tongue-in-cheek, that the federal tax system should be reformed by abolishing the IRS and basing tax collection on the honor system. Doing this would be a most interesting experiment. Granted, it would be dangerous, but educational.

One key question is the definition of “honor system.” To me, an honor system means that a requirement exists to do or to refrain from doing something, and though no one is enforcing the requirement, compliance is mandatory. To others, an honor system means “comply if it suits you.” Though some honor systems use random enforcement as an incentive to encourage compliance, that is not what Razar is suggesting, because the current federal tax system uses that approach. Razar is describing a system where no enforcement exists.

Another key question is which existing system provides the best comparison. For example, what sort of compliance rate exists under existing honor systems for stores in small towns when the proprietor needs to step away from the counter? Compliance with certain laws is quite high, even in the absence of visible enforcement. On the other hand, compliance with speed limits is almost non-existent except when heavy traffic eliminates all other options.

The effectiveness of the honor system depends on the culture, norms, and self-discipline of a society. I’m told, for example, that in Japan, because stores are so small, people leave their packages at the door, and they are there when the patrons exit. On the other hand, consider that, according to this article, airport baggage retrievals are no longer on an honor system in many South American and Asian countries, suggesting that the incidence of theft had become too high. Hotel mini-bars, once based on a absolute honor system, are now rigged with computer sensors that automatically charge the guest’s invoice. I am confident that the compliance rate was so low that hotels computed a revenue recovery in excess of the cost of the refrigerators equipped with computer sensors. Quite recently, according to this story, the honor system has been ditched by the Los Angeles Metro system. In the tax world, to use this article as one example, compliance with the use tax is woeful. So it’s fair to predict that an “honor system” approach to federal taxation would reduce revenues tremendously.

Why are honor systems generally so ineffective? The answer is that the primary incentive for compliance, shame, has lost its power in present-day culture. I discussed this phenomenon in the context of taxation in Taxes, Citizenship, and Shame. Cheating, Taxes, and Shame, Taxes, Citizenship, and Something More Than Shame, and Raising the Tax Shame Noise Level. Surveys show that most people do not consider cheating on taxes to be shameful. I concluded, “We live in an age when shame does not have the effect it once did.” A person needs only to look around for a few hours, for example, by sitting and watching people in a shopping mall, to understand why I, and others, have reached this conclusion.

The bottom line is that no tax system works unless there is some sort of enforcement authority. Whether it is called the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Revenue, the Bureau of Internal Revenue, the Division of Taxation, or the Franchise Tax Board does not matter.

One of the questions posed to me, especially by several high school and elementary school classmates, is how the math-and-science guy ended up in law, a social science. The answer is both simple and complex. The simple part is that math and science thrive in tax law. The complex part is that many other disciplines are wrapped up in law, and my intellectual interests are nowhere near as constrained as they appeared to my classmates.

My fascination with numbers and structures reaches back to very early childhood. So it’s no surprise that over the years I have enjoyed reading and taking courses in arithmetic, science, computer programming, and languages. But I have also immersed myself in books and courses dealing with history, theology, and geography.

The path to taxation is easy to describe. When, in high school, I decided to apply to the University of Pennsylvania, the undergraduate business program at Wharton grabbed my attention. When I arrived at Wharton and started selecting my courses, I was drawn to accounting, which to me was a combination of math, science, and language. One of the advantages of the Wharton undergraduate program at the time was its business law department. I took every available course, benefitting from sitting in courses taught by outstanding practitioners and law faculty. At about the same time I started working part-time for an accounting firm. The partners quickly detected my facilities with tax, and had me preparing and reviewing returns within months of my arrival. They began to talk of bringing me in full-time after I graduated, to be groomed to replace the tax partner who was nearing retirement. But I had noticed that among the firm’s clients were a dozen or so law firms, some of whose partners were doing tax work and bringing home significantly more than the accounting firm partners were earning. It was one of the few times in my life that dollar signs influence me more than I would have expected. I decided to attend law school, explaining to the partners that it would make me better at dealing with tax issues. And that was the route I was ready to take until I arrived at law school, the teaching urge resurfaced, and I changed directions. It was all for the better, because the accounting firm merged with another firm and eventually was absorbed into oblivion. I doubt that I would have ended up as the firm’s partners had projected. It was, as it often is said, all for the better. And the rest, as they also say, is history.

Two of the tasks that teachers do, though some don’t list it among their most favorite aspects of teaching, are creating examinations, quizzes, and similar assessment devices and grading student responses. Creating a valid and fair assessment device is not easy. Getting the right mix of questions of high, medium, and low difficulty requires a combination of experience and awareness of the goals of the course. Grading a well-designed examination isn’t as simple as many people think that it is.

Though I had administered quizzes when I was teaching Latin to eighth-graders many years earlier, examination administration and grading were not parts of the other teaching activities in which I had engaged. So it was with some degree of delight that I responded in the affirmative when the Chief Judge of the Tax Court asked me, and another attorney-advisor, to design and prepare the examination administered to non-lawyer tax practitioners who want to be admitted to practice before the court.

We did not construct the exam in a vacuum. Our work product was reviewed by several judges. We were quizzed on why we included the questions we had selected. We were asked why and how we developed the choices that were offered on the multiple-choice questions. When it came time for me to prepare my first law school examination as a law professor, I could look back and make use of what I had learned from developing the Tax Court’s admissions exam. That exam was superseded time and again during the more than 30 years that have since zoomed by.

In the first class of any of my courses, one of the points I try to get across to my students is that we are teaching them to teach. I explain that throughout their careers they will be teaching partners, associates, supervisors, opposing counsel, administrative agency employees, and judges. Trying to get a person to understand one’s position is easier if that person can learn how and why the arguments underlying that position are constructed.

My conclusion that I am teaching students to teach has many roots. A very important one is the time I spent as an attorney-advisor to the Honorable Herbert L. Chabot of the United States Tax Court. He, too, was a teacher, and in fact that is how I met him. I was a student in the course he taught in my LL.M. (Taxation) program.

Judge Chabot brought his teaching style into his chambers. He would bring his one or both of his attorney-advisors into his office, and conduct a class on the issues in his upcoming cases that he wanted us to help him work through. The other judges on the court were bemused by the fact that he kept a blackboard, and chalk, in his office. Judge Chabot’s blackboard became a Tax Court legend. Who used it? He did. We did.

Judge Chabot also used a teaching approach to work through our drafts of the opinions in the cases assigned to him. He asked us why we wrote what we wrote. He asked us why we used the words we had chosen rather than others. He wanted us to explain how we were thinking. He wanted us to teach him. He knew, as he and I discussed in later years, that by being put in the role of teacher, we would be learning. I also learned from him the value of precision, of care in selecting language, of thoroughness in exploring issues, and I have tried to carry those lessons into my teaching, though often to the chagrin of my students.

Even after I left his chambers and entered into my teaching career, the judge and I continued to talk about teaching. He was yet another person who influenced my teaching persona. For that and many other of his lessons, I am grateful.

At about the same time that I was engaged in tutoring during my third year in law school, another of my professors with whom I had also become friends, and with whom I remained friends until his death some years ago, asked me if what he had been hearing from other faculty was true. Did I really want to teach law school? I told him that I had decided it was what I wanted to do. He told me that I ought to learn about becoming a law professor. He encouraged me to do several things.

This professor suggested I talk with the dean to learn about the hiring process. What skills and experience did law schools want their faculty to have? In what sort of law practice should I engage until I started teaching? How many years should I invest in practice before applying for a faculty position? Should I write and publish while I was in practice? The answers then were, of course, different from what they are now. But that’s another story, one that is wrapped up in the transformation of law faculty from what law faculties once were to what they are now.

The same professor also invited me to sit in his first-year class, and to focus on how things transpired in the classroom. Having been through the course, I had a very different perspective. Without needing to take notes on the substantive discussions, I could observe developments of which I had been only been tangentially aware two years earlier. After class, the professor and I would sit down and talk about the class. I asked why he posed a particular question, or provided a particular response. I asked why he stayed with one student even though that student was struggling, and yet not persist with another student who similarly was struggling. I asked why he put certain topics in the sequence he had chosen. I asked why he focused on some portions of the assigned readings but not other portions.

Several members of the faculty spent time with me talking about their teaching philosophies, their exams, their grading systems, and their expectations of students. Another faculty member was content to let me teach portions of his class, about which I will say little but that it was a tax class and my classmates were delighted that I was doing so. To this day, I appreciate what all of these members of the faculty did to help me prepare for law teaching.

Near the end of my third year, some of the faculty made it known to me that they wanted me to return to Villanova to teach. They suggested that I go into practice, which I did, and check back with them in a few years. There already were quiet mentions of starting a Graduate Tax Program, and eventually that is what brought me back to my law school alma mater. But the development of my teaching would continue.

Early in my third year of law school, one of my professors with whom I had become, and with whom I remain, friends, sat me down and asked me if I was willing to help one of his advisees. This particular student was in his first year, and was struggling, to the point that he was at risk of leaving school. The faculty member thought that if I tutored this student I could get him on track. I agreed. Within a day, a friend of the student, who was also in his first year, asked if he could sit in on the tutoring sessions, and offered to double my fee. Why not? So for several days a week, for more than a few weeks, we met, and worked through the first-year material. Again, it was not a matter of teaching them to learn rules of law or to memorize principles. It was a matter of showing them how to prepare for class, how to assimilate material, how to create their own outlines, flowcharts, lists, and other assimilative devices.

It turned out well. The student who was in serious academic difficulty turned it around, and ended up graduating with decent grades. He went on to a very successful career, and today his name sits on the donor plaque outside my office door, a request he made when he contributed to the fundraising campaign for the new building. And his friend? He made law review.

Law school started for me as it does for most first-year students. It was different, it was bewildering, it was interesting, it was fast-paced. But for whatever reason, I caught on. I figured out what my professors were doing and trying to do. All of them had pretty much the same style of teaching, though several relied a bit more on questioning and answering and one was a bit more straight-forward in taking us through the analysis.

At some point, I thought to myself, “I can do what they’re doing,” and in a typical fit of self-confidence, “and I can do it more efficiently and effectively.” As the year progressed, I engaged in conversations with sevearal of my professors about how they came to be law professors, what they were doing in their teaching, and what they were trying to accomplish in their courses.

As my classmates became aware that I had a good handle on much of what we were doing, more than a few of them asked me to explain things to them. Because Criminal Law was my most challenging course, I invested extra time in trying to assimilate the course. At one point, I developed a huge flowchart to sort out the various types and degrees of homicide. When I showed it to several classmates, they were amused, so when I was convinced I had figured out this part of the course, I scrapped the flowchart. Some weeks later, as the exam loomed, these classmates asked if they could see the flowchart. They were not happy when I told them I had trashed it because I didn’t need it. The lessons I learned were that, first, had I hung onto the flowchart I would have had a teaching opportunity and, second, that by teaching I would be learning. This incident, and the time I spent helping my classmates with other subjects, reinforced the growing thought that teaching was in my future, and that it would be law teaching.

After I graduated from high school and entered college, I continued to tutor high school students in several subjects. These students were neighbors attending the same high school as I had attended.

My teaching style evolved, in part because I was refining my approach to reflect my college classroom experiences, and in part because I had a better sense of what was required to do well in the courses being offered at the high school.

Because I was attending college in the same general area as I had grown up, I was able to split my time between the college campus and my parents’ home. It was time-consuming, but by that point I had decided that teaching was something in which I was interested pursuing on a more permanent basis, and it made sense to me to invest the time to build up experience.

Though I did not realize it at the time, I was increasingly using techniques that I would later encounter in law school. I refrained from simply delivering information and encouraging memorization. I focused on helping students find patterns of thinking, sequences of analysis, and arrays of comparative contrast.

High school brought another opportunity to teach. Two thoughts coalesced in my mind. One was that I enjoyed teaching. The other was that it would be helpful to get a head start learning Latin while in eighth grade. That combination of ideas triggered a visit to the convent. I volunteered to teach Latin to the eighth grade students who wanted to get a jump on what was then the entry-level Latin class.

So once a week, for about half of the academic year, I made my way back to my elementary school and taught very basic Latin to a small group of students. Most of these students had finished their classwork for the day and were waiting for the school bus to return to take them home on the second or third trip of the afternoon for the school bus and driver. I conducted the sessions as a regular class, with assignments, quizzes, and a final grade. I didn’t try to cover much, but wanted to give the students enough of a familiarity with Latin so that they did not approach their ninth-grade class with deep anxiety.

By the time I reached high school, I had learned to pipe down in the classroom, though I wasn’t in it all that much by the time I was in eighth grade. It was good that I had learned some degree of self-control, because the European order of priests and lay teachers constituting the faculty of my high school would tolerate no misbehavior. At all. But they also were quite sharp, and quickly figured out that I wasn’t learning anything in Latin I. They asked questions, I answered. They made two decisions. First, I was not going to cruise through Latin I, but would, in addition, study other languages. Second, I would be given the opportunity to become a Latin tutor.

Tutoring other students worked out well for me, and, I think, the students. I learned that teaching on a consistent one-on-one basis is different from standing in front of a group of students in a classroom. I learned that a one-size-fits-all lesson plan would be a waste of my time and the student’s time. I also, for the first time in my life, earned money from teaching. It helped finance my subsquent education.

I remember a few of the names of the students I tutored. There are others whose names escape me but I remember where some of them lived. Most of them were one, two, or three years behind me. I wonder if they remember digging through Latin texts while I looked over their shoulder. I wonder if learning Latin helped them as much as it has helped me. I hope so.

My next foray into teaching also has its roots in the struggles that the elementary school teachers encountered trying to deal with me in the classroom. It wasn’t that I was disrespectful, or lazy, or inattentive. I talked too much. Surprise.

Just as I’m confident that the nuns talked among themselves about their students, I’m also very confident that they shared their tougher challenges with the pastor. One day, in fifth grade, I was summoned to the principal’s office to meet with the Rev. Joseph Kane, a brilliant, well-educated, determined, no-nonsense, good priest. He put me to work. I was to study Latin, I was to catalogue his library (which had remained in boxes for the half-dozen years or so since he had been appointed), and I was to learn to be an altar boy sooner than usually was the case.

It wasn’t long before Fr. Kane decided that he could save himself some time by shifting altar boy education from himself to yours truly. Now I needed to learn to be organized, to adapt instruction to the particular learning speed of each trainee, and to be on top of the various topics that were involved. For the curious, the topics included Latin, liturgy, and logistics. The logistics included learning about vestments, candle-lighting, incense, and Mass preparation. And as I was doing this, my education continued, as I was invited and permitted to study from seminary texts, but that’s a totally different thread that has very little to do with this series about becoming a law professor.

My earliest memory of engaging in teaching activities takes me back to fourth grade. It’s possible that I was teaching before that time. Surely I had fallen into the habit of explaining things to people long before I was nine years old. But if I was doing any sort of teaching in those earlier days, no one in the family has ever mentioned it. I’m confident, though, that if I had been teaching, someone in the family would have said something about it by now.

My fourth-grade teaching experience originates in the challenges I posed to my elementary school teachers. I knew the answers, I was bored, and I wanted to help my classmates. So it was not unusual for me to give the answer to get a classmate off the hook. The teachers were unsure what to do. The teachers who were nuns gathered for lunch and dinner in the convent, and my guess is that at one point my fourth-grade teacher made some sort of comment or request for advice about an annoying, rarely silent, but intelligent youngster. My guess is that one of the eighth-grade teachers, a nun with a reputation of being tough, said, “When you’ve had enough of him, send him to my classroom.” And so she did.

One day, after I had blurted out answers to a series of questions, Sister Mary Josetta sent me off to one of the three eighth-grade classrooms. I remember being greeted by Sister Anna Marita with something along the lines of, “So you think you’re smart? Let’s see what you know.” I was first asked to give what could be described as a lecture on world geography, a topic not in the curriculum for the first four grades. After I did an overview of the continents, the various countries, and their capitals, the teacher invited the students to quiz me about geography. Not fourth-grade geography. Eighth-grade geography.

There’s a twist to the story. My older brother was in that class. He and his friends were delighted with the chance to go after “Eddie Maule’s little brother.” So out came the questions. And I dished back the answers. I was having a grand time. The questions became increasingly technical. I was asked to name the principal products of various countries, to select from a list of several randomly named countries the one with the largest land areas, to provide the names of mountain ranges and lakes, and to describe a variety of other things within the scope of geography.

When I returned to the fourth-grade classroom, I was asked to give a report on what had transpired in the eighth-grade classroom. I did. I mentioned that I had enjoyed the experience. So it was not long before I made another journey to visit the eighth graders. Though I do not remember how many times I did that, I do remember the subject matter changing from geography to history, arithmetic, and a few other things.

Two things stuck with me, aside from my discovery that being in the front of the room was much more fun than sitting at one of the desks. First, from that time forward, my brothers’ friends treated me with a strange sense of awe not often bestowed on younger children. Second, the boys grilled me and the girls pretty much remained silent.

Every once in a while, someone asks me how or why I ended up teaching tax, or teaching in a law school. There are two versions of the story. The short one, and the long one. When I provide the short version, follow-up questions generate the long version. Today I begin a short series in which I provide the long story. And when the question is posed to me in the future, I can respond with the short version and then point the questioner to MauledAgain.

The stories I share are about me. There’s probably more to the answer, lurking somewhere in my genetic ancestry. Descendants of my ancestor Thomas Maule of Salem, Massachusetts, are disproportionately represented in what I call the “expressive” careers, such as preaching, teaching, lawyering, acting, and writing.

On several occasions in the past, I have tried to make the point that the cost of stopping tax increases can exceed the tax increase thereby avoided. In Liquid Fuels Tax Increases on the Table, I wrote, “Leaving gasoline taxes at their current levels guarantees more bridge collapses, and pothole-caused front-end alignment repair costs that will take more out of motorists’ pockets than the proposed tax increases.” I made the same point in You Get What You Vote For, when I predicted that “front-end alignment spending will skyrocket past the small amounts that would have been paid if the [highway repair tax funding] proposal had been enacted.” In Zap the Tax Zappers, I explained why tax evaders need to face the consequences with these words, “Lest this be thought too rough, think of the person who dies when their vehicle hits a pothole and goes out of control, a pothole not repaired because of revenue shortfalls and spending cuts triggered by the actions of a group of people who refuse to pitch in and fulfill the obligations of citizenship.”

Now comes news from the United Kingdom that the cost of damage caused by potholes exceeds the cost of fixing the potholes. One-third of drivers belonging to the Automobile Association reported that their vehicles had been damaged by potholes.

In Los Angeles, according to this report, city council is considering a plan to repair potholes that are causing an average of $750 each year on car repairs for each driver. A proposed increase in real property taxes would cost property owners $35 per $100,000 of assessment. The problem, of course, is that some homeowners don’t own vehicles, but all homeowners rely on someone’s vehicle to take them places or to deliver goods and services to them. So which is better, $750 a year in car repairs or $35 in additional real property taxes per $100,000 of assessed value? My guess is that most people think, “Oh, my car won’t be damaged by potholes.” And in the United States, the chances of getting governments, that is, other taxpayers, to pay for front-end alignments, or worse, are very low.

By failing to increase taxes or road charges to deal with potholes, the U.K. government has left itself open to paying damages that cost far more than those taxes or road charges. Eventually, taxes will need to be raised to fund the payments being made to those whose vehicles are damaged by potholes. It isn’t rocket science to figure out that by successfully blocking tax increases, the anti-tax folks have succeeded in generating increases in government spending, thus requiring increases in taxes or increases in deficits. Those two outcomes are situations that the anti-tax folks claim to dislike, so the ultimate conclusion is that the anti-tax folks are working at cross-purposes with themselves. That comes as no surprise to me. Hopefully it comes as a wake-up call surprise to those seduced by the pied piper claims that people save money when they pay fewer taxes. The choice is easy to understand. Pay a little bit now or pay much more later.