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Saturday, June 30, 2018

Democratic States Sue Trump Administration Over Tax Overhaul

“The curse of knowing more is that you see more.”



STARE, PRY, LISTEN, EAVESDROP. DIE KNOWING SOMETHING.YOU ARE NOT HERE LONG.


-Walker Evens


Heather M. Field (UC-Hastings), Tax Opinions & Probability Theory: Lessons from Donald Trump, 156 Tax Notes 61 (July 3, 2017):
This report uses tax opinions rendered to Donald Trump’s enterprises in the early 1990s as a case study for examining the relevance of probability theory in multi-issue opinions in which each tax position must be correct for the desired benefits to be achieved. This report also makes recommendations for incorporating probability theory into tax opinion practice.

New York state is investigating whether the Donald J. Trump Foundation violated tax laws, according to a senior Cuomo administration official, and legal experts say the bar for any resulting criminal charges is high.

Robin Fisher (Office of Tax Analysis, U.S. Treasury Department), Geof Gee (Office of Tax Analysis, U.S. Treasury Department) & Adam Looney (Brookings Institution), Same-Sex Married Tax Filers After Windsor and Obergefell, 55 Demography 1423 (2018):
This article provides new estimates of the number and characteristics of same-sex married couples after U.S. Supreme Court rulings in 2013 and 2015 established rights to same-sex marriage.


Wall Street Journal, Democratic States Sue Trump Administration Over Tax Overhaul:

A coalition of states led by New York sued the federal government Tuesday, alleging that last year’s tax overhaul was politically motivated and designed to interfere with the rights of states to manage their finances. New Jersey, Connecticut and Maryland joined New York in the federal lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in New York. The lawsuit takes aim at a part of the new tax law limiting federal tax deductions for state and local taxes to $10,000.
The plaintiffs said the new law raises the federal tax liability of millions of taxpayers in those states, making it more difficult for the states to maintain their taxation policies. The tax law also seeks to force the states to slash public spending, the plaintiffs said.

Wall Street Journal editorial, Albany’s Millionaire Tax Revolt


In absolutely any moral sense these things are pure theft, but they’re all legal, because in America, despite all this society’s supposed hatred of “class warfare,” it’s legal for the rich to prey upon the rest of us. In America, a common person might go to jail for writing a bad check, but a billionaire vampire can destroy people’s careers and strip their healthcare from them and just straight-up hand that money over to one of his rich pals and nobody can even so much as write either of them a fucking ticket for it.

Neil H. Buchanan (George Washington), The Ability-To-Pay Principle and the Counterintuitive Distributive Justice Analysis of Alimony Payments (JOTWELL) (reviewing Alice Abreu, Tax 2018: Requiem for Ability to Pay, 52 Loyola L.A. L. Rev. ___ (2018)):
The tax bill that Republicans in Congress passed, and that Donald Trump signed in December 2017, might end up being one of the shortest-lived tax laws in U.S. history. Not only are large elements of it explicitly temporary, but the political moment that led to its passage seems already to be passing, quite likely to be followed by a time when progressive tax policy will once again be politically viable.


Sydney Ideas | Do We Have a Right to Psychological Privacy?
Speakers: Mia Garlick, Sophie Farthing and Peter Leonard



George Soros Bet Big on Liberal Democracy. Now He Fears He Is Losing. NYT

Bloomberg, Without Tax-Cut Boom, Banks Would Be Facing a Bust:
Here’s the latest sign of who’s benefiting in President Donald Trump’s economy: Without the tax cut, bank earnings growth in the second quarter would have been pretty close to zilch. Instead, the nation’s six biggest banks are set to report a 14 percent improvement in earnings in the April-to-June period. Nine of every 10 dollars of that increase is thanks to the tax cut. Just one dollar came from an actual improvement in operations.