All the top Tax news.

Last week (June 22-26) I was at an international tax conference in Berkeley. As it was devoted to looking at existing literature, I didn't hear much that was new to me while there.Tomorrow I'm off again to another international tax conference, this one in Oxford at the Said Business School (July 6-10) and involving a number of new papers or talks. I'll be presenting twice, and hope to get the PowerPoint slides up on the NYU website, in which case I'll link them here. One concerns a chapter of my new international tax book in progress, while the other discusses U.S. trends in international tax…

While Ed Kleinbard was Chief of Staff at the Joint Committee on Taxation, he sought to modify and revive tax expenditure analysis, along grounds which I thought added to its usefulness and intellectual coherence. What is going to happen to JCT's tax expenditure analysis now that Ed has moved on to USC Law School?From an interview with new JCT chief of staff Tom Barthold in the June 29 edition of Tax Notes:TA: Your predecessor also focused a lot on the tax expenditure issue and, for example, looking at how to define expenditures. Will you continue that work, or are there areas that kind of…

California is teetering on the budgetary cliff these days, issuing IOUs in lieu of meeting its obligations because it can't adopt a plan to close the budget gap even though it is wealthy enough to do so without serious difficulty.The IOUs remind me of the line in Duck Soup, where Groucho asks Ambassador Trentino for a personal loan until payday and offers a 30-day note. "If it isn't paid in 30 days, you can keep the note."Living across the country from California, and thus not myself directly facing the main consequences as this plays out, the question that occurs to me is whether this is a…

Today, with a bit of heart-wrenching assistance on the home front, Shadow met his end. At age 18, his body was breaking down on several fronts, with multiple severe conditions that required a very high level of active daily care - seemingly inadequate, however, so far as we could tell, to give him a decent quality of life. At the end he had diabetes, a thyroid problem, bladder problems, kidney disease, was unsteady, and may have had bad arthritis. He would still eat, but slept and rested the remainder of the time, meowing plaintively in an uncharacteristic way and sometimes seemingly trying…

... So as NOT to subscribe to the Washington Post, now that it has fired its only good print or on-line political columnist, Dan Froomkin, for political incorrectness as defined from a neoconservative perspective.I already don't and wouldn't subscribe to the Post, but living in Washington would make it more pointed.All things considered, probably not a good enough reason to live in Washington.