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

 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

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

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

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

 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

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

Yesterday at the colloquium, Kim Clausing presented Capital Taxation and Market Power, which focuses on the importance of extra-normal returns that are earned these days, especially by big multinational companies such as the FAANG crew (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google). Extra-normal returns are important not just to rising high-end inequality in the US and around the world, but also analytically. For example, as I discuss here, they can reverse both the efficiency and the incidence analysis of entity-level corporate income taxes. They can also reduce the need for income rather than co ..read more

 My prior post offered some background regarding the 4 case studies in Jeremy Bearer-Friend's paper. This one will focus on the paper's terminology of race-based (and other, such as class-based) "tax weapons" - a proposed takeaway from the analysis, and well worth discussing although I like case studies (including these) whether or not they have specific takeaways for contemporary readers. The paper defines a tax weapon as a provision reflecting use of the tax system to harm political rivals. A tax weapon is race-based insofar as the targets are people in particular racial or ethnic categ ..read more

Yesterday at the colloquium, we discussed with Jeremy Bearer-Friend his new article, forthcoming in the UC-Irvine Law Review, entitled Race-Based Tax Weapons. This is a case study (but also drawing broader policy-relevant conclusions) of the following four twentieth century "poll taxes" imposed by Anglophone governments: 1) The poll tax that Texas imposed beginning in 1903 to prevent Blacks, and to a lesser extent poor whites, from voting. This was a uniform head tax of $1 per adult male that actually pre-dated the Civil War (at which point it was payable only by whites). Low as this may ..read more