How Will Trump’s Tax Plan Affect Middle-Income Families?

By Stephanie Hoffer, @profhoffer

The President’s one-page tax plan, released on Wednesday, claims that it will “[p]rovide relief to American families – especially middle income families.” Whether tax reform eventually lives up to the President’s claim, though, will depend on how he and the Congress choose to address not only tax rates and the standard deduction, but also the personal exemption and credits related to children and dependents.

Like the Republican blueprint for tax reform, the President’s plan would double the standard deduction while trimming itemized deductions. It also would expand the credit for child and dependent care, although the plan doesn’t specify how.

Notably, the Republican proposal would eliminate personal exemptions provided by § 151, which allow a deduction of $4,050 per dependent in 2017. Dependents include a taxpayer’s spouse, children, and other members of the household who rely family support. Although the repeal of § 151 was not specifically mentioned in the President’s proposal, the President and Congress must reach consensus on how to reduce the cost of tax reform. Eliminating personal exemptions in favor of an expanded standard deduction may be an approach on which both could agree, but it may not be good policy. Continue reading “How Will Trump’s Tax Plan Affect Middle-Income Families?” →

We Should be Taking President Trump’s Tax Plan Seriously

By: David J. Herzig

Today President Trump’s top tax advisors laid out the first details of the his tax plan. Chief economic adviser Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin unveiled the plan which according to Fox News, Cohn called “the most significant tax reform legislation since 1986, and one of the biggest tax cuts in American history.”

Oh, did I mention that the details of the biggest cuts were printed on a single sheet of paper?

There has been plenty of ink (and jokes) already spilled about the plan. For example, you can read Richard Rubin of the WSJ (here) or Alan Rappeport of the NY Times (here). The long and the short of the plan is it seems to very very costly. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget guesses it could cost $3 to $7 trillion with their estimate at $5.5 trillion. That is a lot of money!

Continue reading “We Should be Taking President Trump’s Tax Plan Seriously” →

Trump’s Back-to Basics Tax Plan: It’s Tremendous!

Aren’t we all wondering what President Trump’s big tax reform announcement will be tomorrow? Loyola Los Angeles Tax LL.M. student Anosh Ali ventured a tongue-in-cheek guess in a short memo he wrote in Katie Pratt’s Tax Policy class. We’ll see tomorrow how good a prognosticator Anosh is.

Until then, at least we know that his Presidential ‘voice’ is spot on

TO: President Trump

FROM: Anosh Ali, White House Communications Specialist

RE: Your tax reform press conference on Wednesday

DATE: April 25, 2017

_____________________________________________________________________________________

You have asked me to prepare talking points for your tax reform press conference tomorrow. This memo includes general talking points and responses to hostile questions you are likely to get from the liberal media. Continue reading “Trump’s Back-to Basics Tax Plan: It’s Tremendous!” →

Grover and Godwin

By Sam Brunson

Over the weekend, tax opponent extraordinaire and Americans for Tax Reform founder Grover Norquist said …

Well, I’ll let him speak for himself:

Without the new income tax powers USA could never have massively intervened in WW1
We did and got USSR/WWII/millions dead
Bad 16th amendment

— Grover Norquist (@GroverNorquist) April 23, 2017

In two follow-up tweets (here and here), he clarified and doubled-down on his position: essentially, he argues that (a) without the 16th Amendment, the country couldn’t have enacted an income tax, (b) without an income tax, we couldn’t have afforded to enter World War I, (c) if we hadn’t entered the war, the Versailles Treaty wouldn’t have happened,[fn1] and (d) without the Versailles Treaty, World War II, with all of its attendant evils, wouldn’t have happened.[fn2] Continue reading “Grover and Godwin” →

A Libertarian Tip

By: David Herzig

Yesterday on Twitter, Scott Greenberg (@ScottElliotG) posted the following tweet from Matt Bruenig.

Well, David Gamage, Omri Marian, Andy Grewal and I had fun in 120 characters debating the quality of the tax advice provided on both the receipt and the note. Suffice to say: (A) this will be appearing on a number of basic income tax exams shortly;[1] and, (B) neither piece of advice provided by “Mr. Libertarian” seems to be correct. Both David and I pointed out that the “tip” did not seem to meet the old Duberstein detached and disinterested test. Clearly there was a quid-pro-quo; don’t spit on my food and I will give you extra money in addition to the bill.

Joking around about the gift/income distinction made me think that tipping is very tax inefficient. Assuming that what I said is true: tips are not gifts and they are income to the recipient. This means that the payment is not deductible by the payor (just personal consumption) yet income to the recipient, i.e. the server. If it is ordinary income to the recipient, then there should be a corresponding wage deduction, right?

Let’s assume the following counterfactual. The restaurant includes the tip as part of the bill. The restaurant pays the employee salary including the entire tip. Under this structure, the restaurant would receive an entire wage adjustment for the tip paid. The customer is still does not receive a deduction for paying the employee’s wages and the employee still pays the same amount of income tax. But the employer captures the unused deduction for wages by the customer. Theoretically, this deduction could be shared by all the stakeholders to reduce costs to all parties.

Who cares? Well, only economists and tax professors, probably. Back to finals preparation!

[1] Here is David Gamage’s hypo: customer leaves $1K and says, I just won the lottery and want to share some of my winnings as a “gift”.

The Surly Subgroup Turns One!

Time flies when you’re having fun, I guess. Today is the one-year blogiversary of the Surly Subgroup. What started off as a group-blogging experiment hatched at last year’s Critical Tax Conference at Tulane Law School has provided quite a bit of entertainment for Surly bloggers and our guest bloggers, and hopefully for our readers as well.

It’s obviously been a big year on tax and other fronts. Since our inception, we’ve published 206 blog posts on a variety of topics. And we’ve drawn readers from 140 different countries.

Surly regulars and guest bloggers have covered various tax-related issues surrounding politics and the 2016 election—including disclosure of presidential tax returns, the Emoluments Clause, the Trump Foundation, and the Clinton Foundation. We’ve written about churches, 501(c)(3)s and the IRS treatment of non-profits. We’ve discussed the tax reform proposals of the 2016 presidential candidates and the #DBCFT. We’ve written several administrative law posts about Treasury Regulations and rulemaking.

Politics aside we’ve also covered other important issues in tax policy—including taxation and poverty, healthcare, tax policy and disabilities, tax compliance, and tax aspects of the Puerto Rico fiscal crisis. We’ve discussed several issues in international and cross-border taxes, touching on the EU state aid debate, the CCCTB, taxation and migration, the Panama Papers, tax leaks more generally, and tax evasion in China.

We hosted our first ever online Mini-Symposium on Tax Enforcement and Administration, which featured posts by ten different authors on a variety of tax administration topics. The Mini-Symposium was spearheaded by Leandra Lederman. Leandra had organized and moderated a discussion group on “The Future of Tax Administration and Enforcement” at the 2017 AALS Annual Meeting, and many of the discussion group participants contributed to the online symposium. We hope to organize future online symposia on other topics.

We’ve blogged about various conferences, workshops, and papers, both tax related and not-so-much tax related. We’ve also had lots of fun writing about taxes in popular culture – Surly bloggers and guest bloggers have written about the tax aspects of Pokémon Go, tax fiction, music-related tax issues (Jazz Fest! Prince! “Taxman”!), soccer players, dogs, Harry Potter fan fiction, Star Trek, and John Oliver. Surly bloggers even recorded a few tax podcasts!

In short, it’s been a busy year, and we’ve had a lot of fun with the Surly platform. We hope you have as well. Going forward, we’re going to keep the blog posts coming. We also hope to draw more regular and guest bloggers and to organize other online symposia.

Thanks for reading!

Panama Papers: The One-Year Anniversary

By: Diane Ring

This month marks the one-year anniversary of the Panama Papers leak. In April 2016, the ICIJ announced the leak and a few weeks later (May 9, 2016) released a database that included a subset of the leaked data. The leak itself comprised over 11 million records spanning 40 years from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. At its core, the leak revealed the true ownership of over 200,000 offshore entities, thereby raising a host of tax and political questions regarding many of the entities’ owners.

So what has happened over the past year as a result of the leak? Continue reading “Panama Papers: The One-Year Anniversary” →

The Games We Play

Shu-Yi Oei

I’ve been ever so slightly glum since my colleague Ann Lipton went and blogged about this game called the Unicorn Startup Simulator over at BLPB. The goal of the game is for your startup to have a billion dollar valuation by the end of the year while keeping your employees happy. You have to make a series of decisions juggling those two goals. Turns out that’s harder than one might imagine. Here is what keeps happening to me:

Screenshot 2017-04-10 23.18.32

So, I guess the message is “don’t quit your day job”?

Anyway, I was feeling grumpy about not having cool tax games to call our own but then I went hunting around and realized, WAIT, we do have tax games! Whether they’re cool or not is another story.

Here are a couple:

Continue reading “The Games We Play” →

Neil Gorsuch and the Tax Law

On Friday, the Senate confirmed Neil Gorsuch as the newest Justice on the Supreme Court, and today he was officially sworn in, taking the seat that Justice Scalia’s passing left vacant.

When Justice Scalia passed away, I looked at the tax opinions he had authored. It turns out, Justice Scalia didn’t author a whole lot of tax opinions, and those that he did author were, as I said, “workmanlike,” without the verbal pyrotechnics, wit, and flair he was known for.

I was curious whether Justice Gorsuch would bring anything different to that seat, so I looked for tax opinions he had authored.[fn1] My search terms brought up 34 hits; the vast majority were not actually cases dealing with the federal income tax.[fn2] In fact, I only saw two cases dealing with federal income tax issues, and neither of them really dealt with the tax law. Continue reading “Neil Gorsuch and the Tax Law” →

Teaching Depreciation with a #DBCFT Lurking

Shu-Yi Oei

I’m teaching depreciation in my Basic Federal Income Tax class this week. As I suspect is the case for most tax profs, our coverage of depreciation comes right after we wrap up discussion of expense taking in §§ 162 and 212 (and § 195) but before we get to § 165 losses.

Depreciation is literally my favorite topic in the entire universe to teach. I mean, if I was going to get a tattoo of a Code section on myself, it would literally be “26 U.S.C. § 168 (as amended).” No disrespect meant to 26 U.S.C. §§ 167, 179, 197 and friends. [Distraction: Here is a virtual tattoo generator. You, too, can practice getting your favorite Tax Code section inked on yourself.] I firmly believe that you can teach any number of core skills in tax class by teaching depreciation (e.g., statutory construction, policy choices, reading cross-references, political economy and legislative change, time value of money, etc.). Conversely, I also tend to think that if you can understand the depreciation statute in Basic Tax and explain it to your classmates, you can do pretty much anything in our legal profession.

Therefore, putting aside all of the reasons why cash-flow expensing may not have the effects that one might hope, I will be absolutely heartbroken if we actually end up with a cash-flow tax, because then what am I gonna talk about in tax class?

All of which brings me to today’s dilemma: Do I mention the ubiquitous #DBCFT in teaching depreciation this week? Or can I just pretend it’s not happening? If one does teach cash-flow expensing, when does one bring it up (i.e., in what order of coverage)? My inclination is to (1) explain the basics of how economic cost recovery over time works in theory; (2) talk briefly about the ACRS changes in 1981; (3) teach the Simon v. Commissioner cases (violin bows) to illustrate the policy tensions that arise once we move from true economic recovery and actual useful lives to ACRS and statutory recovery periods; (4) discuss #DBCFT as an alternative design approach, noting the possible benefits and downsides of that approach, noting that there’s some discussion in the ether right now re whether we should be doing this (and deemphasizing the border adjustment features); (5) introduce bonus depreciation concepts (§§ 168(k) and 179) as an illustration of how expensing has surreptitiously worked its way into the conversation in the guise of bonus depreciation circa financial crisis; and then (6) move right along to parsing the actual statutory elements of §§ 167 and 168 and understanding how it all stitches together.

This strikes me as a nice middle ground between (1) dorkin’ out and going #DBCFT full bore and totally losing the class, and (2) just ignoring the current debate. I’d be curious to know what other tax profs are doing with coverage here.

The Strategic Case Against the Democratic Filibuster of Neil Gorsuch

Photo: Jarrad Henderson, USA TODAY

By: Daniel Hemel and David Herzig

[Note: This post is co-authored with Daniel Hemel, Assistant Professor of Law at The University of Chicago School of Law.]

The strategic case against a Democratic filibuster of Neil Gorsuch is straightforward. The argument is not that the filibuster will prevent President Trump from putting someone like Andrew Napolitano on the Court. The argument is that the filibuster may prevent President Trump from filling a future vacancy with a well-credentialed conservative who is ideologically similar to or right of Judge Gorsuch. To elaborate:

— (a) The filibuster accomplishes no work when there are fewer than 50 Senators who will support a nominee on an up-or-down vote. (Napolitano presumably falls into this category.)

— (b) The filibuster also does no work when there are 50 or more Senators who will support a nominee even if that means going nuclear. (Judge Gorsuch appears to fall into this category.)

— (c) The filibuster matters when (1) there is a nominee who would win 50 or more Senators on an up-or-down vote, but (2) fewer than 50 Senators would support the nuclear option in order to put the nominee on the Court.

Is (c) an empty set?

Continue reading “The Strategic Case Against the Democratic Filibuster of Neil Gorsuch” →

Cross-Training (or, Tulane Corporate and Securities Law Roundtable)

My pal Ann Lipton–corporate governance and securities law expert and blogger extraordinaire over at BLPB–is organizing a conference at Tulane Law School today on the topic of “Navigating Federalism in Corporate and Securities Law.” It looked so interesting that I had to leave Henry Ordower and Kerry Ryan’s fabulous Critical Issues in Comparative and International Taxation: Taxation and Migration Conference a day early to crash her party! I’ve been auditing Securities Regulation and very much feeling like a little duckling in the securities/corporate world all semester, so I’m really looking forward to sitting in on an unfamiliar conversation. I always find that “cross-training” in other fields gives me fresh perspectives on my own work.

Here is the schedule. Some of these papers are really interesting!

The Problem of Large Shareholders
(Discussant: Urska Velikonja)

Robert Jackson (Columbia), Activist Directors and Information Leakage
Edward Rock (NYU), Defusing the Antitrust Threat to Institutional Investor Involvement in Corporate Governance

The Problem of Small Shareholders
(Discussant: Ann Lipton)

Jill Fisch (Penn), Advance Voting Instructions: Tapping the Voice of the Excluded Retail Investor
J.W. Verret (George Mason), Uber-ized Corporate Law

What Can States Regulate?
(Discussant: Jill Fisch)

Kent Greenfield (Boston College), Corporate Power and Campaign Finance
Summer Kim (Irvine), Corporate Long Arms

The Line Between Corporate Law and Securities Law
(Discussant: James Cox)

Ann Lipton (Tulane), Reviving Reliance
James Park (UCLA), Delaware and Santa Fe
Robert Thompson (Georgetown), Delaware’s Dominance: A Peculiar Illustration of American Federalism

The Operation of the SEC
(Discussant: James Park)