
Start Making Sense
883 FOLLOWERS
Unfair but balanced commentary on tax and budget policy, contemporary U.S. politics and culture, and whatever else happens to come up. Author Wayne Perry is a Professor of Taxation at New York University Law School.
Start Making Sense
5M ago
With the start of NYU's fall 2024 semester, I thought I should offer an update here on the public sessions at our 2024 Tax Policy Colloquium.
All sessions will meet on Tuesdays, from 4:15 to 6:15 pm, in Furman 310, and most or all will be followed with small group dinners that generally include the speakers.
Here is our schedule:
1) Tuesday, September 10 – Ellora Derenoncourt, Princeton University Economics Department. Wealth of Two Nations: The US Racial Wealth Gap, 1860-2020.
2) Tuesday, September 24 – Andrew Hayashi, University of Virginia Law School. The Federal Architecture of Income Ineq ..read more
Start Making Sense
6M ago
About 18 months ago (I remember the time because I was visiting at U Va Law School), I briefly got interested in how Chat GPT makes things up. E.g., I asked it what my novel Getting It is about. It confabulated in response that it's about the need for broad-based tax reform, etcetera. (Which, needless to say, it is not - the program generalized from superficial knowledge of my other work.)
Since I gather that Chat GPT improves exponentially over time, I decided just now to give it another try. Here is what I got regarding Getting It:
"Getting It" by Daniel Shaviro is a satirical nove ..read more
Start Making Sense
8M ago
Today the Supreme Court released its decision in Moore v. United States, upholding the 2017 tax act's mandatory repatriation tax (MRT) on foreign source income (FSI) of American-controlled foreign corporations. The MRT was eminently sensible in principle, although far from perfectly designed in practice, in that the applicable FSI had previously been subject to deferral - i.e., it would be taxed to the US shareholders upon repatriation. Cashing out the deferred tax when you eliminate it, even if at a reduced rate, is very difficult to argue against on policy grounds.
Right-wing activists nonet ..read more
Start Making Sense
11M ago
I just posted this piece on a libertarian-affiliated U of Chicago website. Based on a 2013 article that I wrote concerning Henry Simons. It discusses the question of why a Friedrich Hayek-affiliated "classical liberal" would have supported both vigorous anti-monopoly enforcement and a high-rate progressive income tax - positions that are anathema to the likes of (say) a Richard Epstein or Milton Friedman (if he were still alive) today ..read more
Start Making Sense
11M ago
Presented without comment, part of a spam email that I got today, pertaining to a (co-authored) casebook for introductory federal income tax classes:
Dear Daniel,
I trust this email finds you in good health and high spirits.
We are delighted to reach out to you regarding your book, "Federal Income Taxation" which was submitted to us through your literary agent. After a meticulous evaluation, we are thrilled to inform you that your book has been selected as one of the exclusive Content Titles for adaptation into a film. We have entered into a collaboration with Netflix, and we are honored ..read more
Start Making Sense
1y ago
It occurred to me recently that my two favorite pop songwriters of the last 25 years - Fiona Apple and Stephin Merritt (The Magnetic Fields) - on the surface seemingly couldn't be more different. So why should they both be personal favorites of mine? True, both are astonishingly gifted, but there are other talented songwriters out there as well.
Part of it is just happenstance and stylistic affinity. And I have nowhere close to as broad a sense of what's going on in the music biz, even limiting it to the relatively rock-affiliated space, as that which I had, well, let's just say some decades a ..read more
Start Making Sense
1y ago
In a prior post, I had mentioned that the 2024 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium might need to shift to a new time, due to changes in the law school's scheduling blocks to accommodate multiple objectives. It now turns out that there will be less change than I had been thinking might be necessary.
We will still be meeting on Tuesdays (in fall 2024), and the start time has been moved slightly earlier, to 4:15 pm (ending at 6:15 pm, and followed by a small group dinner. There is a small chance that it will end up being moved earlier still, to a 4 pm start time.
We'll also be meeting in a new (for us) roo ..read more
Start Making Sense
1y ago
Yesterday, in the last session of the 2023 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, Edward Fox co-presented his paper (co-authored by Benjamin Pyle), Who Benefits From Corporate Tax Cuts? Evidence from Banks and Credit Unions Around the TCJA. (I'm not linking it here because it's a preliminary draft that the authors plan to post when it's a bit further along.)
But just as initial background first, I've now completed 28 (!) years of running the colloquium, which for the first 25 years I always did with a co-convenor. Next year I'll be doing it solo again, and also with just 6 rather than 13 public sessions ..read more
Start Making Sense
1y ago
Yesterday, at our penultimate public session for 2023, we discussed a pair of items (one already published, and one an early partial draft) by Ajay Mehrotra discussing U.S. tax history, and in particular our distinctive fiscal character.
As the papers note, the U.S. tax system, considered in isolation, is unusually progressive by peer country standards, but also unusually small. So Americans are not "over-taxed" (as some liars like to assert) by peer standards. But the broader U.S. fiscal system is unusually lacking in progressivity.
Nearly everyone but us has a national-level VAT o ..read more
Start Making Sense
1y ago
I enjoyed the National Tax Association's 116th Annual Meeting, which concluded in Denver yesterday. Due to the pandemic plus last year's hurricane threat in Miami, it was actually the first live NTA Annual Meeting since 2019 (!). This added to the pleasure this time around, as did (for me) the fact that I was awarded the Daniel M. Holland Medal for "lifetime achievement in the study of the theory and the practice of public finance."
I've posted the talk I gave at the award ceremony here. I also gave a talk about my recently posted article on medical expense deductions, and watched as my co-aut ..read more