Mauled Again: No IRS? Really? Uh, Guess Again:

Here we go. According to this report, White House officials attending a Richmond, Va., meeting of Congressional Republican leaders setting the agenda for the next Congress are floating the "national sales tax" idea. Perhaps it’s like any trial balloon, see if anyone pays attention before getting too deep into the project. But here’s the weird part. The report states: "President Bush and House Speaker Dennis Hastert have both said the idea of a national sales tax deserves a serious look. For many, the idea of a world without the Internal Revenue Service is very seductive."

Mauled Again: Blogging as Scholarship? Yes, Indeed:

Tyler Cowen’s musings on the scholarly content of blogging are definitely deserving of the two minutes it takes to read through them. It is the best compilation I’ve seen to date of the reasons law blogs can, and in certain instances, ought to be treated as legal scholarship. The days of the student-controlled, student-edited, untimely, narrowly circulated, limited production, paper academic law journals hopefully are limited. And if blogging contributes to their demise, I will shed no tears.

Mauled Again: Partnership Taxation: The Quantum Physics of Law?:

From Foxman v. Comr., 41 TC 535,551 (1964), Judge Raum, one of the most brilliant Tax Court judges and tax lawyers I’ve met, wrote in footnote 9 (long before I met him and long before tax was in my brain) the following paen to partnership taxation, the statutory provisions for which are in subchapter K of the Internal Revenue Code:

The distressingly complex and confusing nature of the provisions of subchapter K present a formidable obstacle to the comprehension of these provisions without the expenditure of a disproportionate amount of time and effort even by one who is sophisticated in tax matters with many years of experience in the tax field.

Start Making Sense: Time for Leading Conservative Thinkers to Guard their Reputations:

We are at an interesting point in the Administration’s push to create individual accounts in Social Security. With tax reform on the back burner at least for now and nothing changing in Iraq even as they keep announcing that they have broken the back of the insurgency, Social Security is where the Administration is going to want to make its second term mark. Some basic contours of the proposal are already pretty clear. Over the next ten years, use hundreds of billions in present-law payroll tax revenues to create individual accounts for people below a given age such as 55, funded, if that is really the word for it, by borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars.

Tax & Business Law Commentary: No Conflict In Their Interest:

The case of Stup v. UNUM Life Insurance Co. illustrates that (i) insurance companies are as susceptible to the lures of conflict of interest as anyone else, (ii) insurers apparently have no problem buying "expert" opinions that are tailored to fit the conclusions they desire, and (iii) insurers will often go to great length to deny benefits, putting costly roadblocks in the path of insureds who are entitled to coverage.