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Most Recent Posts

Should enQ Get To Sell Spots In IRS Phone Queue?

Should enQ Get To Sell Spots In IRS Phone Queue?

I really hope that this plan does not work, because there is something about it that offends my sensibilities.  It is taking something that is free now and turning it into a commodity.  I could build a rationale for it, but I rate this as worse than what the rental car companies do when they sell the same couple of gallons of gas over and over and try to intimidate you into buying overpriced insurance.  Or the airlines who arrange their cabins on the principle that most people are short and charge extra for seats that don’t require people over six feet tall to contort themselves.

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IRS Rules Bingo Is For Charities Not A Charity In Itself

IRS Rules Bingo Is For Charities Not A Charity In Itself

The portion of the IRS that concerns itself with exempt organizations is reeling from the fallout of the interminable scandal.  It has come in for criticism from the other side now for its granting of exempt status to Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, which was pretty explicitly started to avoid spending disclosure for poltical activity.  And here we have the IRS worrying about what organizations can run bingo.

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Oxymorons In The Tax Law Can Not Be Fixed With Clever Ideas

Oxymorons In The Tax Law Can Not Be Fixed With Clever Ideas

It is worth noting that even though the taxpayers did not have a really good commons sense argument, they did have an argument.  There are some areas of the Code where partnerships and S Corporations are recognized as “taxpayers” – making elections, having distinct accounting methods and engaging in transactions with owners for example.  Who knows maybe if they had gotten this up to the Supremes, the late Justice Scalia, God rest his soul, would have been on their side from a strict textual reading.  Or maybe not.

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How Valid Is Tax Foundation Dynamic Scoring?

How Valid Is Tax Foundation Dynamic Scoring?

I will probably continue to cite the Tax Foundation’s estimates in discussing presidential plans.  I have not found anybody who questions their static scoring.  When it comes to the dynamic scoring, I am going to suspend judgement, because I don’t think there is as much of a consensus among economists as to how taxes afffect the overall economy as there is, for example, among climate scientists on the effect of carbon dioxide on global warming.  So I think we may be giving the Tax Foundation’s model just a little more credibility than it deserves. It has a model that allows it to put out results quickly and that matters a lot in the attention that it gets, but it does not make it right.

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Easement Deductions – A Place In Greenwich Village And A $25 Million Eagles Nest

Easement Deductions – A Place In Greenwich Village And A $25 Million Eagles Nest

Of course, if the property is already at its highest and best use (meaning the use that will yield the most money in the long run), the easement has little or no value.  That often turns out to be the case with easements on buildings in historic districts.  There are already plenty of restrictions on the property.  The method that can raise eyebrows out in the country is subdivision analysis.  I read somewhere that if all the hypothetical subdivisions that have supported easement donations were built, we would have enough houses for the next couple of centuries and very little in the way of farmland.

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Is Tax Foundation Unfair To Bernie Sanders?

Is Tax Foundation Unfair To Bernie Sanders?

Nonetheless, there is much that the TF cannot capture and it does not even pretend to.  If we were actually able to have a single payer medicare for all system, I think there might be some very positive effects on entrepreneurship and small business formation.  In the current system, concerns about health insurance tend to tie people to jobs.  Companies that provide health care coverage now might find it a lot simpler to just pay 6.4% and also be relieved that they are not picking up the tab for the other half of a couple that works somewhere that does not provide insurance.  Something that I have not seen discussed anywhere is what effect single payer health care might have on workers comp and liability insurance rates.

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Kentucky Can Attract Tourists Who Like Bible More Than Bourbon Without Violating First Amendment

 I tend to think that incentives like this one are really bad tax policy.  A really good thing would be for all states to enter into an agreement to refrain from them, since they threaten a race to the bottom.  I don’t think very highly of young earth creationism, although I am less disturbed by it than many.  The upside of YEC is that it actually gets some people to think.  If you doubt that, check out Tony Reed’s How Creationism Taught Me Real Science series.

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IRS And The Tea Party – Scandal Enters A New Millennium

The narrative that seems most plausible to me is Lois Lerner as the Agent From Hell.  AFH is my term for a certain type of IRS agent that I have thankfully only encountered a couple of times in my career.  AFH is not that technically astute, but AFH is dogged.  And AFH is certain that your client is up to no good.  AFH just hasn’t quite figured out what that no good is.  That was Lois Lerner and the Tea Party applications, only she had to do her work through minions.  Lois Lerner was passionate about the dark money issue and nobody else seemed to care. So she tortured her line agents to get them to torture bewildered applicants who were already pumped up on conspiracy theories. A perfect storm of bureaucratic bumbling coming across as brilliantly subtle conspiracy.

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