Monday, January 30, 2012

An Oily Tax Question

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Thanks to a question from a subscriber to one of the Tax Management portfolios that I wrote, I had the opportunity to review an interesting ...
Thursday, January 26, 2012

Lying About Tax Myths

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Peter Pappas is at it again. In More Lies about Tax Lies , he attempts to rebut the points I made in Tax Myths, Tax Lies, and Tax Twisting ....
Wednesday, January 25, 2012

A Must-Read Tax and Economic Policy Book

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When I characterize a book as a must-read, I try to put my characterization into context. Thus, some books that I have read are tagged as a ...
Monday, January 23, 2012

Tax Myths, Tax Lies, and Tax Twisting

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For me, the difference between a myth and a lie is that the folks believing in the former don’t know any better and those spreading the latt...
Friday, January 20, 2012

Some Tax Lessons Are Difficult for Some People to Learn

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Though the decision to cut taxes while initiating military action turned out to have had serious adverse consequences for the American econo...
Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Is It Any (Tax) Wonder?

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The other day, in a conversation with someone, the focus turned to lotteries, sweepstakes, and whether it made any sense to enter allegedly ...
Monday, January 16, 2012

Teaching Taxes A Long Time?

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Jared Eutsler, a faculty member at Rasmussen College who writes for the colleges’s Business School blog , has released his 20 Blogs Accounti...
Friday, January 13, 2012

Tax Advice With No Teeth

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It is not difficult to guess what part of the second paragraph of the opinion in United States v. Allen , Nos. 10-2160, 10-2161 (1st Cir. 01...
Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Better Compliance = Lower Tax Rates?

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The IRS has just released its latest tax gap estimates . Because the collection and analysis of data lags behind the filing of returns and t...
Monday, January 09, 2012

Tax as a Retaliatory Tactic

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Tax practitioners are very cognizant of how tax can be used as a retaliatory tactic. Consider the disgruntled employee who reports, or threa...
Friday, January 06, 2012

Tax Complexity of the Dividend Kind

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About a month ago, the Tax Court, in Rodriguez v. Comr., , 137 T.C. No. 14 (2011), considered whether corporate earnings included in a marri...
Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Tax Punting, Tax Uncertainty, and Tax Complexity

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On Saturday, 71 federal income and excise tax provisions “expired.” In other words, as of January 1, 2012, these provisions are no longer ef...
Monday, January 02, 2012

An Interesting Tax Idea

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Ian Ayres and Aaron Edlin have come up with an interesting tax idea. In Don’t Tax the Rich. Tax Inequality Itself , they propose that whenev...
Friday, December 30, 2011

How Politics Generates Tax Complexity

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Earlier this week, in Punting on Taxes , I noted that the two-month extension of the payroll tax reduction “leaves businesses, hiring manage...
Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Tax Ignorance of the Historical Kind

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This time, the tax ignorance takes on an historical flavor. In a Philadelphia Inquirer article comparing the Great Depression with the curre...