Media Dragon: Miranda Stewart: Redistribution Between Rich and Poor Countries

How many digital natives can resist the urge to click on da MEdia Dragon ...
The Psychology of Social Media Addiction - Cloudnames blog

The surprisingly successful addict. During her battle with alcohol, Leslie Jamison got prestigious degrees, sold a novel, and took the world by storm
After Retiring From The IRS At 58, Dorothy Steel Started Acting At 88 And Hit It Big At 92 In 'Black Panther'

*The cost of privilege
This research, commissioned by Anglicare Australia, shows that each year, a staggering $68 billion in taxpayer dollars, greater than the cost of Newstart, disability support, or any other benefit, is spent keeping the wealthiest Australian households wealthy

Pecuniary penalties for competition law infringements in Australia 2018
This report compares Australia's pecuniary sanctions regime for competition law infringements to that of a number of other major OECD jurisdictions. Pedro Caro de Sousa, Sean Ennis, Semin Park

A poor tax - Council tax in London: time for reform

Luke Murphy, Charlotte Snelling, Alfie Stirling

Ex-Trump campaign chair asks judge to toss tax, fraud counts

How two economists got access to IRS tax data. Bravo to them I say, but it’s worth noting that the shift from regression-driven to data set-driven economics has been a remarkably inegalitarian development, widely praised by most top academic economists. So often progress means a willingness to disregard or even stomp on egalitarian norms.

Raj Chetty of Harvard University and Emmanuel Saez of University of California (UC), Berkeley, created a big media splash last summer with a study showing that social mobility—the income status of adult children relative to their parents—correlates with where the children grew up. The study, based on an analysis of millions of U.S. tax records that had been largely off-limits to researchers, has fed the public perception that the American dream of equal opportunity for all may be fading. It also bolstered the reputations of the two young superstars—each has received the top prize for economists under 40 and a MacArthur “genius” award. And it has left their colleagues wondering how they pulled off such a feat.
“It was very entrepreneurial of them to get access to the data, which is not normally available,” says Gary Solon, an economist at Michigan State University in East Lansing who has done pioneering work on social mobility using small data sets from surveys, the traditional approach to studying the topic. “You need the energy and perseverance and connections. My guess is that it was probably some combination of skill and luck.”


26/3/18, 11:43 pm What a splendid day I've had. Most people have to die to have nice things said about them. I only had to be flicked from @smh & @theage - much easier. Thanks for the kind thoughts, tweeters. Still filing till April 15 and then - something or other.

We need an inquiry into ASIC - it's an embarrassment

*Slovak PM resigns after journalist’s murder OCCRP
‘Prime Minister Robert Fico resigned … following mass protests and political turmoil over the murder of a journalist who delved into corruption and links between organized crime and politics.’

Tax Commissioner Chris Jordan offends accountants with rort comments

Australian Tax Office cracking down on holiday home owners ...

Secret BCA commitment to Senate shows members ...

The secret vow, which has emerged in the midst of the business blitz on the Senate crossbench to pass the Turnbull government's company tax cuts, would bind the likes of Qantas, Fortescue and BHP to "pay our tax and show our commitment by signing the ATO's tax transparency standard."

After Panama Papers, Indonesia urges true owners to come out of hiding

Indonesia has beefed up its corporate transparency and will require all companies to regularly disclose their actual owners (rather than just their legal representatives). The new rules target those who reap financial rewards from these companies and are designed to combat corruption.

Stories of collaboration: A huge story we wanted to tell the world

Alia Ibrahim is a co-founder of the news website Daraj. She worked on ICIJ’s most recent investigation, Paradise Papers, and reflects here on what it was like to collaborate across the world.

The Elephant Always Forgets: U.S. Tax Reform and the WTO, by Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan) & Martin Vallespinos (S.J.D. 2018, Michigan)

James R. Repetti (Boston College) presents Tax Rates, Efficiency and Inequality at BYU today as part of its Tax Policy Colloquium Series hosted by Cliff Fleming and Gladriel Shobe:

Traditionally, the great democracies of the western world assigned equal weight to distributive justice and economic efficiency in designing a tax system. In the past few decades, however, economic efficiency has dominated the debate about the best design of a tax system in politics and in analysis by legal academics. Discussions of progressive tax rates often focus on the adverse efficiency effects of high rates while ignoring benefits arising from a progressive rate structure’s reduced burden on lower income individuals. For example, many advocate low tax rates on investment income to reduce the efficiency effects of taxing savings.

In an attempt to increase efficiency, individual tax rates have decreased over the past 60 years. In 1956, the maximum statutory tax rate was 91%. Currently, the maximum tax rate is 37%. At the same time that tax rates were reduced, inequality increased, fueled in part by the declining tax rates.

There are several explanations for the intense focus on efficiency.

IRS Referrals for Criminal Prosecution Reach New Low
“The latest available data from the Justice Department show that during January 2018 the government reported receiving 135 new referrals for prosecution from the Internal Revenue Service. According to referral-by-referral data obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), this number was down substantially from its peak four years ago. For the most recent twelve month period this meant that IRS referred only 1,824 taxpayers for criminal prosecution, compared with the same twelve month period four years ago when it had referred more than twice that number (3,896). http://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/crim/502/.”

Why are corporate penalties for cartels so low in Australia?

Regulation of Beneficial Ownership in Latin America and the Caribbean

March 26, 2018 by Andres Knobel Leave a Comment

My paper - Andres Knobel - on “Regulation of Beneficial Ownership in Latin America and the Caribbean” which I wrote for the Inter-American Development Bank is now available in Spanish and English here. The paper, published in November 2017, provides an explanation on the concept, obstacles and … [Read more...]

Diane Ring (Boston College) presents Leak-Driven Law, 65 UCLA L. Rev. __ (2018) (with Shu-Yi Oei (Boston College)), at UC-Irvine today as part of its Tax Law and Policy Colloquium Series hosted by Omri Marian:

Over the past decade, a number of well-publicized data leaks have revealed the secret offshore holdings of high-net-worth individuals and multinational taxpayers, leading to a sea change in cross-border tax enforcement. Spurred by leaked data, tax authorities have prosecuted offshore tax cheats, attempted to recoup lost revenues, enacted new laws, and signed international agreements that promote “sunshine” and exchange of financial information between countries.

The conventional wisdom is that data leaks enable tax authorities to detect and punish offshore tax evasion more effectively, and that leaks are therefore socially beneficial from an economic welfare perspective. This Article argues, however, that the conventional wisdom is too simplistic.

Miranda Stewart (Australian National University), Redistribution Between Rich and Poor Countries:

The topic of redistribution between rich and poor countries opens a can of worms. This paper first inquires into what we mean by some of these words and second, considers the role of taxation in redistribution. It briefly considers the various modes of redistribution to address poverty and inequality, including the role of taxation, within a country before turning to consider modes of redistribution between rich and poor countries. The paper then turns to consider whether we are asking the right question. Should the question, really, be about redistribution between rich and poor people? In an increasingly global and digital era, how might we reconsider the role of taxation in achieving this?

New York Times, A Curveball From the New Tax Law: It Makes Baseball Trades Harder:

As President Trump congratulated the World Series champion Houston Astros at a White House ceremony last week, he also heaped praise on himself and congressional Republicans for passing a sweeping tax cut last year. He hailed Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the House’s chief tax writer and an Astros superfan, as “the king of those tax cuts.”