Kyle Pomerleau does a nice job here of taking down the idiotic (and probably, as a manner of administrative discretion, illegal) idea of unilaterally, by Treasury action, indexing capital gains for inflation.

The core problem is that inflation adjustments apply on both the plus side and the minus side of the ledger. If one excludes the inflationary component of gains while still allowing taxpayers e.g, to deduct the inflationary component of their interest costs, then pervasive tax arbitrages worsen income measurement and will induce pervasive game-playing by wealthy tax avoiders.

In the spirit of the capital gains plan’s idiocy, I was trying to think of what else would be logical by its dim lights. So here’s an idea: In traditional IRAs or other such tax-preferred savings vehicles, you deduct the contribution, but pay tax on the withdrawal. In Roth IRAs and other such alternative tax-preferred savings vehicles, you don’t deduct the contribution, but you exclude the withdrawal.

To a great mind like Steve Mnuchin’s, the lesson should be obvious. Why not combine the best features of each? Create a savings vehicle in which you can make unlimited deductible contributions (a la traditional), and then exclude the withdrawals (a la Roth)!

Better still, Mnuchin can decide to authorize this by Treasury fiat. What’s more, if there are no limits to taxpayer contributions, and no minimum timing periods before tax-free withdrawals are allowed (and why would we want to impede people’s economic planning?), then no one need ever pay income tax again!

Just think how this might hyper-charge our economy in the run-up to November 2020, even with a trade war and ever-rising tariffs on everything.

Next Friday to Saturday (September 6-7), NYU Law School will be hosting the 2019 Journal of Law, Finance, and Accounting (JLFA) conference, in a joint venture with the Stern Business School at NYU. Info about the conference, including its schedule, is available here.

There’s only one tax paper at the conference, by my friend Yehonatan Givati of Hebrew University, entitled Theories of Tax Deductions: Income Measurement Versus Efficiency. I will be the commentator, and I will use, although I have not yet decided whether I will subsequently post, PowerPoint slides.

We now have all the titles for this fall’s papers at the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, although the later ones especially may in some instances be placeholders. It goes something approximately like this:

All sessions meet from 4 to 5:50 pm at NYU Law School, Vanderbilt 202. For papers by the co-convenors (Lily Batchelder on September 3, and mine on October 1), we’ll have NYU colleagues as guest commentators: Liam Murphy for her paper and Mitchell Kane for mine.

Here is the link for a talk that I’ll be giving at Reed College in Portland, OR, on September 26. The topic is literature and high-end inequality, as per my forthcoming book.

I have almost completed a draft of the article that’s been a prime focus of my summer research. The current, perhaps overly wordy, title is “Digital Service Taxes and the Broader Shift from Determining the Source of Income to Taxing Location-Specific Rents.”

I’m not quite ready to post it on SSRN yet, but I’ll be discussing it: (1) at the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium on October 1, (2) at the University of Toronto Law School on October 16, (3) at the National Tax Association’s Annual Meeting in Tampa, exact date & time still TBD but November 21, 22, or 23, and (4) at the National University of Singapore on January 14 of next year.

This is a bit of a hot topic, although I’m taking a big-picture conceptual view rather than zeroing in on particular versions. (But I do use the recently announced UK DST as an illustrative example). It’s probably fair to say that I diverge from hyperventilating American quasi-orthodoxy about (i.e., against) the DST.

Subject to competing time demands, etc., I’d be happy to hit the road & discuss the piece and the underlying issues that it raises, be it inside or outside the U.S. (I’ll be on sabbatical in winter/spring 2020, hence with some scheduling flexibility.)

I saw the new Tarantino film yesterday, I mainly quite enjoyed it, but didn’t think it was great. And not nearly as convulsive as, say, Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs.

It’s rather an odd duck. One set piece after another, usually entertaining but without much forward momentum. Also, it feels incredibly tailored to his personal obsessions – e.g., his pro-old Hollywood, anti-hippie nostalgia, and his wanting to re-create what a pool party at a Playboy mansion in the late 1960s might have been like – without entirely making the sale to the audience that we should share them at least for the film’s duration. (Cf. Hitchcock, who specialized in effectively transmitting his dark personal obsessions to the audience.)

Brad Pitt was very charismatic in the classic old Hollywood manner. DiCaprio, interestingly, was deliberately made far less so, although as an actor he obviously has similar chops.

The ending, not to issue undue spoilers to any few of you out there who might not know it yet (but who still plan to see the film), drew power from the (altered) historical event’s having such a huge cultural resonance, at least to anyone old enough to know and care about it. So there was a point at which the tension rises because one is thinking, my gawd, here it comes. But I still was left with a sense of a bunch of different things thrown together because they’re all stuff from 1969 that the director wanted to play with

I’m sorry to hear of Mort Caplin’s death, although it’s great that he made it to age 103 (and was mentally sharp even when extremely old).

I worked at Caplin & Drysdale in the early 1980s, and I agree with Scott Michel (who started the same year I did but stayed a lot longer, and is quoted in the above article) that Mort set a crucial positive tone regarding the office atmosphere, as well as one about serving clients assertively if needed but ethically. He was also affable and charming, including to junior associates.

Only on one occasion did I work with Mort directly on a project, but it left a good taste. He was interested in a live issue at the time, concerning the IRS’s ability in audits to access tax accrual workpapers that a given taxpayer’s accountants had used to evaluate tax risks for financial accounting purposes.

Mort was thinking about pursuing in litigation a legal position to the effect that the IRS should generally be denied access to such workpapers, on the view that allowing it would undermine financial accounting by inducing accountants (or taxpayers in discussions with them) to pull punches regarding soft spots, the taxpayer’s possible settlement strategy, etc.

This concern is clearly a meaningful one, even if on balance one nonetheless favors granting access. But my task (obviously) wasn’t to figure out what I thought about the merits, but rather to look at precedents, etc., for a sense of how strong the case would be. I concluded from my research that, based on the case authorities etc. to date, the IRS was extremely likely to win on this issue. (As indeed was soon confirmed – see U.S. v. Arthur Young, decided by a 9-0 Supreme Court in 1984.)

After working all day on a Saturday or Sunday to finish the memo, I per instructions took a taxi up to Mort’s rather nice home (in NW Washington, I think? – but I could be mistaken) to hand him the memo and briefly discuss it. Given the circumstances, I was grungily dressed and unshaven, and I recall having a harder time getting a cab to stop for me than would usually have been the case when I was wearing my regular weekday suit and tie.

When I got there, Mort, though gracious, was clearly not pleased with my conclusion, as it was not what he wanted to hear. But I got the sense that he accepted both its legitimacy (although obviously he didn’t read it in detail until I had left), and that I had properly done my job.

We have now completed our schedule for the fall 2019 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium. (By “we” I mean myself and my co-convenor, Lily Batchelder, with the gracious cooperation of our invitees.) This will be the first, but hopefully not the last, time that we offer the colloquium in the fall.  All sessions will meet on Tuesdays, from 4 to 5:50 pm, in a room on the second floor of Vanderbilt Hall. Anyway, here goes:

As I am currently writing an article that will extensively discuss digital services taxes (DSTs) – albeit, in a broader context of thinking about multinational entities’ (MNEs’) economic rents and stateless income – I am certainly interested by France’s enactment of a DST, and by the prospect of a punitive U.S. response.

I’m still trying to learn more about the tax (my French might not be good enough for reading an untranslated text to do me much good). But it is summarized, for example, here,

The NYT discusses the possible U.S. response – tariffs, of course, as no matter the question they are often the current Administration’s preferred answer – here.

Perhaps unusually among tax experts (and Americans!), I am inclined to be sympathetic to properly designed DSTs, for reasons that I discussed here and here in response to Wei Cui’s very interesting paper on the topic (presented this past April 30 at the winter-spring 2019 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium). And I also think that an aggressive American response would be unwise, among other reasons because our friends – as I hope they still are – across the pond are addressing reasonable concerns about tax avoidance and locally generated rents.

The French DST appears to be aimed primarily at the likes of Facebook and Google  Per the EY summary (and translation of some provisions) that I linked above, it would apply to:

1. “The supply, by electronic means, of a digital interface that allows users to contact and interact with other users, including for the delivery of goods or services directly between those users.”

2. “Services provided to advertisers or their agents enabling them to purchase advertising space located on a digital interface accessible by electronic means in order to display targeted advertisements to users located in France, based on data provided by such users. These services include, among others, the buying, stocking and diffusion of advertising messages and the management and communication of users’ data.”

But it would exclude, inter alia, digital interfaces that provide users with digital content, communications services, and payment services (e.g., Youtube, Netflix, and the financial intermediation industry). As I’ll discuss in my article, if one otherwise views the tax favorably, such exclusions may not be well rationalized – leaving aside the financial sector, which might call for separate and more comprehensive treatment.

Obviously this is what they call a developing story, and I’ll try to comment here when appropriate although at the moment I’m more focused on getting my arms around the issues from a broader and more conceptual standpoint.