The rebate checks haven’t yet arrived, and they are already being deemed likely to have little impact on the economy. That isn’t surprising. What is perplexing it that they were successfully portrayed for a short while as likely to do anything other than increase the Federal deficit. Readers may recall at the time the idea […]
Read more...I nearly fell off my chair. Ben Stein’s column this week, “What McCain Could Do About Taxes,” is sensible and vastly more tightly written and argued than his previous work. No free association or gratuitous name-dropping, no leaps of logic, no wishful thinking. More shocking, not only does he take issue with the Republican party […]
Read more...The Fortune article by Allan Sloan, “BofA’s awesome Countrywide tax break‘ was more blunt, pointing out that we taxpayers are helping subsidize Bank of America’s purchase and Mozilo’s payout. The tax savings are reported to be worth a half a billion over the first five years after the deal close, due to Bank of America […]
Read more...In the Financial Times, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers calls for the implementation of a fiscal stimulus package in the US in the first half of 2008. He argues that the question is not whether to prop up the economy, but how, that is, whether via monetary or budgetary actions. His view is that a […]
Read more...Menzie Chin at Ecnobrowser supplied this chart from the Congressional Budget Office November Budget Review: The red line is receipts, and if you are an optimistic sort, you might persuade yourself that the gap has gotten smaller and therefore will continue to shrink. The fly in the ointment, however, is obvious. Receipts are a function […]
Read more...The IRS is turning up the spotlight on hedge funds and private equity firms. It appears that some may have been taken what might politely be called overly aggressive tax positions. It’s going to be pretty hard for these captains of capitalism to convince the public that they need to keep their favorable tax treatment […]
Read more...A very good item at the Huffington Post by Al Norman, “Wal-Mart: America’s Tax Deadbeat,” which describes the lengths the Bentonville company goes to in order to cut its local property tax assessments. This story in essence elaborates on a piece that appeared in the New York Times earlier in the week. The issue here […]
Read more...In a March post, “Private Equity’s Image Problem,” we expressed considerable reservations about Blackstone’e effort to form a lobbying group (the Private Equity Council) to among other things, press for the continued favorable tax treatment of carried interest, and specifically, the approach taken by its leader. From that post: So the industry could use some […]
Read more...Does anyone on Wall Street have any sense? If you are designing transactions that are solely or primarily about tax avoidance, you don’t leave a mile-wide paper trail, particularly documents with titles like “Tax Efficiency” for the IRS to find. From “IRS Probes Tax Goal of Derivatives” in the Wall Street Journal: Federal tax authorities […]
Read more...One of the big bones of contention in the “what to do about global warming” debate is whether to use carbon taxes or carbon trading to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In theory, either regime could produce a satisfactory result, and many commentators prefer carbon trading, out of what amounts to an ideological bias in favor […]
Read more...One news items that hasn’t gotten much press attention is the effort to close a loophole in the tax code by which the “carried interest” of private equity professionals, which is labor income, gets capital gains treatment. Moreover, the funds are often able to get their regular management fee the same favorable tax treatment as […]
Read more...Apologies for being a bit behind the eight ball. Still under the weather, so forgive me if my posts for the next little while are a bit light on my own commentary. This op-ed piece, “Getting on a low-carbon diet,” by Ronald Brownstein in the LA Times gives an even-handed treatment of the merits of […]
Read more...In today’s op-ed piece, “Gilded Once More,” Paul Krugman picks a few factoids to show how our Gilded Age compares to the 19th century original. He finds that even though ours has a kinder face (due no doubt to the proliferation of TVs, fast food, and other creature comforts that make modern poverty look more […]
Read more...There is quiet distress within the Democratic Party that the need to rein in the burgeoning Bush deficits will severely limit their ability to tackle issues near and dear to their heart, such as health care. As Mark Thoma reports in “Democrats and Deficits,” citing Brad Plumer of the New Republic and Greg Anrig, Nobel […]
Read more...This article by Robert Franks, a Cornell economist, in today’s New York Times gives several simple but compelling examples of how conservative ideology is internally inconsistent. Conservatives like to claim that keeping government small is pro growth and makes us all better off, at least in a financial sense, by giving us a bigger economic […]
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