Neil Buchanan (George Washington) has an excellent three-part series on Dishonest Tax Rhetoric:
One of the oddities of studying taxes is that mind-numbing technical details coexist with bluntly political posturing. The recent debate over taxing hedge fund and private equity fund managers is a good example, with arguments about whether managers’ compensation is more like capital gains income than regular earned income complicating — and, to a certain degree, being used to distract from — the debate over the big political questions of tax equity and income distribution. …The joys of studying tax policy thus include the joy of confronting shameless political rhetoric. To lighten the summer doldrums, I am posting here my top three list of current tax dishonesties, i.e., constantly repeated bits of rhetoric that substitute for analysis in the great and never-ending U.S. tax debate.
