Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
Thursday, May 27, 2004
Brian Leiter reports today that Tax Prof Leandra Lederman (George Mason) has been offered the chair in tax law at Indiana-Bloomington, where she will visit next academic year before deciding on whether to make the move. For a list of over 30 Tax Prof moves for 2004-05, see here.
Thursday, May 27, 2004
William Gale (Brookings) & Laurence Kotlikoff (Boston University) have posted Effects on Recent Fiscal Policies on Today’s Children and Future Generations on the Brookings Institution web site. Here is the abstract:
Recent and proposed fiscal policies—the tax cuts, proposals to make them permanent, and the medicare prescription drug bill—will hurt economic prospects for most of today’s children and all future generations. The programs will leave economic growth largely unchanged, but will redistribute resources from future to current generations and, within each generation, from low- and middle-income families toward an affluent minority. These effects exacerbate the impact of underlying federal budget trends and processes that will place significant, imminent pressure on funding for children’s programs. An expanded program of investments in children is both feasible and desirable.
Thursday, May 27, 2004
The Treasury Department today issued JS-1693:
The Treasury Department and IRS issued guidance today to clarify when film producers may recover costs incurred in acquiring or developing screenplays, scripts, and other creative properties that are not scheduled for production.
“For many years, the industry accounted for these costs in the same way for both tax and financial reporting purposes,” stated Acting Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy Gregory Jenner. “After a change in the applicable financial reporting rules, the industry asked us to address the tax treatment of these costs as part of the Industry Issue Resolution (IIR) program.”
The revenue ruling issued today (Rev. Rul. 2004-58) holds that a film producer may not claim an abandonment loss for the capitalized costs of acquiring or developing creative properties unless the producer establishes an intention to abandon the property and an affirmative act of abandonment occurs. The revenue ruling also holds that a film producer may not claim a deduction for worthlessness unless identifiable events evidencing a closed and completed transaction establishing worthlessness occur.
The revenue procedure issued today (Rev. Proc. 2004-36) provides a safe harbor method of accounting that permits taxpayers to amortize over a fifteen-year period costs for creative properties that are not scheduled for production within three years of acquisition
Thursday, May 27, 2004
Tax Analysts reports that Kevin Knopf, Benefits Tax Counsel for the Treasury Department, stated at the May 26 Silverstein & Mullens Tax Management Luncheon that the IRS may lack the resources to prevent people from using tax-free funds in health savings accounts (HSAs) for reasons other than to pay medical expenses. Unlike other tax-preferred health savings vehicles, trustees of HSAs are not required to police spending from the accounts.
This is the fourth installment of What Tax Profs Are Reading. The goal is to share with the broader tax community reviews of both tax-related and nontax-related books recently read by tax professors. We invite tax professors to submit book reviews for publication on TaxProf Blog.
Jim Maule (Villanova) shares with us his thoughts on Dragon’s Kin (Del Rey, 2003) by Anne McCaffrey and her son Todd McCaffrey:
Collaborating for the first time with her son, the veteran weaver of the tales of the dragons, dragon riders, and folk of Pern has again produced a tough-to-put-down and fun escape. Escape it is, another in one of perhaps only two series of science fiction that for some reason grips me. The other, the Lensman series by e.e. “doc” Smith wirtten in the 60s (and which came to me courtesy of my older brother to the chagrin of my parents who thought science fiction was a distraction from stuff really worth reading), defies comparison for it was written in a different era when science was viewed more favorably than it sometimes is today.
McCaffrey’s stories are set in the future but involve colonizers of a planet who reject most technology and return to a less complex way of life, only, of course, to be hit with unexpected challenges and solutions found in telepathic dragons whose abilities reflect the application of science much more advanced than today’s. McCaffrey gives personalities to her characters that make them seem real, and she lets the usual human problems of greed, deceit, and stupidity conflict with the better qualities of diligence, duty, and love in ways that suggest some things don’t change much. What I like about this series is that she writes them out of sequence. “Dragon’s Kin” is set so that if the books had been released in chronological order it would have been among the first.
McCaffrey uses this technique so that things not understood in an earlier (but later in time) book are explained in the later volume. Surely not an original idea, but it works well. I met the dragons of Pern when I picked up a book from a friend’s bookshelf while visiting at the seashore, and (this is tough even for me to comprehend so, yes, it seems strange) I had some free time on my hands. Suffice it to say I have an entire shelf in one of the built-in display bookcases in my living room filled with the Pern materials, which might break the “show the classics” rule but I’d rather let my display bookcases show myself.
So my ‘to read” pile has shrunk by two books. It remains in the hundreds. I’m almost finished a third (I have this habit of reading more than one book at a time, a tough to abandon habit left over from taking multiple courses in a semester) and I’ll write that one up when I’m finished. It’s not tax, not a biography, not family history, and not science fiction. I’ll leave it at that.
For prior TaxProf Book Reviews, see:
• Jim Maule’s review of James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age
• Paul Caron’s review of Courting the Yankees: Legal Essays on the Bronx Bombers
• Joel Newman’s review of Perfectly Legal
Thursday, May 27, 2004
The European Association of Tax Professors is meeting in Paris on June 3-5. Major panels include:
• Fundamental Freedoms and National Tax Sovereignty in EU
• Cross-Border Loss Relief and International Group Operations
• International Accounting Standards and Taxation
• The PhD in Taxation Academic Track in EU Member States
The TaxProf Blog expense kitty will not permit on-site blogging, so I will try to get one of the U.S. Tax Prof members of EATLP to guest blog the meeting.
Austan Goolsbee has posted a research summary of Taxes, Competition, and the Information Economy on the NBER web site. Here is the Introduction:
The growth of the information economy — the Internet, computers, media, and the like — has generated massive amounts of debate in popular and policy circles. More than that, though, it has raised many interesting subjects for economic research. My work in the area has focused on two general topics: the impact of tax and other government policies in the information economy, and the nature of industrial competition on the Internet and in other information-based industries. In general, the findings have tended to suggest that the responsiveness to price, tax, and other types of shocks in these industries is surprisingly high.
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Today is Tax Freedom Day in New Zealand — the day when the average New Zealander has earned enough money to pay off their total tax bill for the year.
In contrast, Tax Freedom Day in the United States this year was April 11 — the earliest such day in 37 years. For a Special Report by the Tax Foundation on Tax Freedom Day in the various states and foreign countries, see here.
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
The Tax Court in Durham v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2004-125, has rejected a taxpayer’s equal protection challenge to Congress’s limitation of the expanded power to abate interest under Section 6404(e) to tax years beginning after the date of enactment (July 30, 1996). The court concluded:
One obvious rational basis for new section 6404(e)’s effective date is simple administrative convenience. In enacting new section 6404(e), Congress needed to define the situations that would and would not be subject to its provisions. Taking into account that income taxes are levied on an annual basis, it was rational for Congress to restrict the amendment’s application by tax year, limited to liabilities for tax years beginning after the date of enactment and so giving the IRS some time to adjust its own administrative routine at a lower cost to the Government. Considerations of administrative convenience have long been recognized as a valid reason for legislative line drawing. We need not, indeed we must not, engage in judicial second-guessing of such a legislative decision.
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
For strikingly similar religious perspectives on so-called sin taxes (taxes on alcohol, cigarettes, gambling, etc.), compare this Christian blog with this Islamic blog.
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