Tag Archives: Taxes/regulation

Everybody’s Talkin’ ‘Bout Taxes–especially Wealth Taxes and Mark-to-Market of Capital Gains Not surprisingly for those of you who are members of the ABA Tax Section, there is a meeting of that group next week in Florida when a thousand tax lawyers (give or take a few) will be talking about everything from basis to wealth taxes; GILTI, BEAT, Dual BEIT, to EITC.  Yours truly will be on a panel of the Tax Policy and Simplification Committee, meeting Friday...

Guns and Commas I am glad that the large pro-gun rights rally in Richmond on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day ended without any violence as had been threatened by some people around the US.  That is nice, but it does not end the unpleasant situation legal situation that has arisen here in Virginia.  As of now 93 jurisdictions, mostly counties, have declared themselves “gun sanctuaries” where any gun control legislation passed by the Virginia government will...

(Dan here,,,at lunch the other day a friend asked about the great prices for stocks.  This post by Thomas Palley caught my attention as a well written post on the nuances between stocks and finance and the 80% who do not own many stocks and the economy of losers and winners. ) by Thomas Palley  (re-posted) A Stock Market Boom is Not the Basis of Shared Prosperity The US is currently enjoying another stock market boom which, if history is any guide,...

Bloomberg’s Plan for Addressing Economic Inequality: not a wealth tax A bit ago (Jan 8, 2020), the New York Times described Michael Bloomberg’s plan1 for addressing the income and wealth inequality in the United States that has been a constant topic of discussion by Democratic candidates.  Briefly, as with the robber barons of Teddy Roosevelt’s age, the wealth of the global commerce titans and particularly the private equity fund buyers and sellers of...

The Democratic Debate in Des Moines: progressive candidates on means testing versus universality Dana Chasin at 2020 Vision does a good job of encapsulating key issuesthat surface in the Democratic debates. Let’s get this out first:  most listeners will admit that the debates seem both too long and too short, as mentioned on Stephen Henderson’s Detroit Today program this Wednesday 1/15 morning.  They are too short, because candidates are interrupted at...

Tyler Cowen today flags a paper by Currie, Kleven, and Zwiers on changing practices in economics, and highlights the following: Panel A illustrates a virtually linear rise in the fraction of papers, in both the NBER and top-five series, which make explicit reference to identification. This fraction has risen from around 4 percent to 50 percent of papers. This caught my eye, because Matt Yglesias at Vox recently highlighted a study claiming to show large...

For MLK Day: unemployment by race In observance of Martin Luther King’s birthday, almost all US markets are closed and there is no economic data. So on this day let’s see the extent to which economic opportunity in several neutral metrics has improved since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s. Here in unemployment for African Americans (blue) vs. whites (red) since the former began to be measured in 1972 (white unemployment had been...

(Dan here…reposted due to discussion in a previous thread) CRS: Social Security: What Would Happen If the Trust Funds Ran Out? Bruce Webb | July 21, 2015 Very interesting paper that I missed in real time. Social Security: What Would Happen If the Trust Funds Ran Out? Almost everyone who addresses this question assumes that the answer is pretty simple: if either of the Social Security Trust Funds goes to zero than benefits will automatically drop from...

Dan Shaviro (NYU) and Tim Smeeding (WISC) on NPR’s Detroit Today Show For those of you who may not have the opportunity to tune into Stephen Henderson’s radio program Detroit Today on NPR, it might be useful to have a short summary of the January 9 discussion of the “wealth gap” from that program. Background Tax lawyers have traditionally talked of the “tax gap”1  and frequently mentioned the growing “income gap” between the top 1% of the income...

Small Town Support for Trump and “The Working Class” Much has been written about voters, sometimes labeled the “white working class”, who live in small towns, have low incomes and supported Trump in 2016.  There are various hypotheses—not, despite the rhetoric, mutually exclusive—that have been proposed to explain this: never-ending latent racism galvanized by the experience of having a black president, a vote of despair in the face of economic decline,...