Friday, June 29, 2012

Federal Ready Return, Part Three: Income Tax Return Accuracy

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Though Ready Return advocates praise their proposal as a generator of increased tax return accuracy, the reality is quite different. To assu...
Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Federal Ready Return, Part Two: The Value of Self-Compliance

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Federal Ready Return will erode the value of the self-compliance principle of the federal income tax system. There is a very good reason th...
Monday, June 25, 2012

Federal Ready Return, Part One: Introduction

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For quite some time, I have been an outspoken critic of the Ready Return concept, which was adopted in California but which has not taken of...
Friday, June 22, 2012

Some Tax Things Cannot Be Forced

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A recent Nebraska case, Bock v. Dalbey addressed the interesting question of whether a spouse can be forced to file a joint return. The cou...
Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Taxes as an Element in Damages

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It is not uncommon for taxes to be an element in the computation of damages. For example, someone who must purchase goods from an alternati...
Monday, June 18, 2012

Doing the Math: Ignoring the Long-Term While Focusing on the Short-Term

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In The Valuation Effect of Real Estate Taxes ,while criticizing a purported proof of how real estate tax changes affect values, I remarked, ...
Friday, June 15, 2012

The Valuation Effect of Real Estate Taxes

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A real estate broker has presented a Real Estate Taxation Mathematics 101 that demonstrates how seriously financial illiteracy is harming t...
Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Can the Philadelphia Real Property Tax System Be Saved?

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The litany of posts that I have written about the Philadelphia real property tax is long. It began with An Unconstitutional Tax Assessment ...
Monday, June 11, 2012

Practical Impacts of Supreme Court Tax Decision

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The facts are simple. For many years, when the city of Indianapolis wanted to build or reconstruct sewers, it divided the cost equally among...
Friday, June 08, 2012

User Fees: Differential Rates Based on Residency

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A practice that has been occasionally used by tolling authorities has become widespread in recent years. According to a recent USA Today sto...
Wednesday, June 06, 2012

The Revenue Diversion Problem

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Readers of MauledAgain know that I take a dim view of governments diverting user fee revenue to purposes unrelated to the reason for imposin...
Monday, June 04, 2012

A Tax Problem, A Solution, So Why No Repair?

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The saga of the troubles afflicting the Philadelphia real property tax continues ceaselessly. First addressed by me in An Unconstitutional T...
Friday, June 01, 2012

Limiting User Fee Use: Beach Tag Fees

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Earlier this week, in an Asbury Park Press story headlined Shore Towns Rake in Millions from Beach Fees , Ken Serrano focused on a specific ...
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Borrowing Money to Fund Tax Cuts

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One of the principal causes of the current economic crisis is the decision to cut federal income taxes while simultaneously increasing milit...
Monday, May 28, 2012

Inserting CRS Reports into the Tax Policy Discourse

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In last Wednesday’s post, The Failure of Tax Policy Deductions: Specific Evidence , I examined the conclusions and analysis of a Congression...
Friday, May 25, 2012

The Philadelphia Real Property Tax: Eternal Circles

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That old quip about death and taxes takes on an even sharper meaning when one considers the never-ending story of the Philadelphia real prop...
Wednesday, May 23, 2012

The Failure of Tax Policy Deductions: Specific Evidence

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Earlier this month, the Congressional Research Service released a study of section 179 first-year expensing and section 168(k) bonus deprec...
Monday, May 21, 2012

Don’t Rob Peter to Pay Paul: Collect Unpaid Taxes

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A little more than a week ago, in Robbing Peter to Pay Paul, Tax Style , I reacted to news that some state legislators are trying to divert ...
Friday, May 18, 2012

Putting Tax Money Where the Tax Mouth Is

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Certain taxpayers are in the habit of trying to obtain public funding for private sector enterprises through tax breaks. The gist of the arg...