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Wednesday, June 06, 2018

Legal Fictions Within Tax: The next Jozef Imrich?


In towering letters outside their Surfers Paradise church, The Anglican Church of the Holy Spirit, a sign reads "FORGIVENESS IS SWALLOWING WHEN YOU'D RATHER SPIT".

 The books Weinstein carried into court: Something Wonderful and Elia Kazan: A Biography

 BIG BROTHER AT WORK: EMPLOYEE MONITORING IN THE ANALYTICS AGE WhoWhatWhy.org
Chinese government denies visas for trip organised by Bob Carr's think tank:Mr Carr, director of the institute, revealed the Chinese government has denied visas to about five Australian journalists for a trip funded by his think tank, a hindrance the former Labor foreign minister said he has not faced before.
The deterioration in relations between Beijing and Canberra now appears to be affecting even the most China-friendly voices in Australia, with trips to the country organised by Bob Carr's Australia-China Relations Institute allegedly being hindered by punitive visa rejections.

"I'm very disappointed that, on this occasion, for the first occasion, we weren't able to get a visa and, as I put on Thursday night to his excellency the Chinese ambassador, if the delay in getting the approval was part of a freeze in the relationship, then I'd have to accept that I guess," Mr Carr told ABC radio on Tuesday morning.
The New South Wales parliament is in the midst of a constitutional crisis after the Upper House voted on Tuesday night to censure and likely expel the leader of the government in the upper house over the Berejiklian government’s refusal to release three crucial reports.
Liberal MLC Matthew Mason-Cox crossed the floor to deliver a rare victory for the opposition and minor parties, 21 votes to 20.
The government now has until 11 am on Wednesday to either produce the three reports or face the expulsion of Don Harwin, a move that almost certainly see the government head to the NSW supreme court.



Senior NSW government minister Don Harwin censured in Parliament


The state government's most senior minister in the upper house, Don Harwin, faces being suspended from Parliament over his refusal to ...
NSW in constitutional crisis as government MP crosses floor over ...


'We make mistakes': ATO agrees to trial independent reviews for ...

       In The Guardian they suggest The next Elena Ferrante ? The best European fiction coming your way. 
       Quite a few of the titles 'coming your way' will only do so in 2019, while several of these authors are quite well established in English -- notably Juli Zeh, with half a dozen books out in English translation. But the selection includes Daša Drndić's Belladonna, so there's that. 
The price of vanilla has hit a record high of $600 (£445) per kilogram for the second time since 2017 when a cyclone damaged many of the plantations in Madagascar, where three quarters of the world’s vanilla is grown. Silver by comparison currently costs $538/kg.
Demand for vanilla has kept the prices high, leading some ice cream manufacturers to cut back and even halt production of the flavour, sparking fears of shortages over the summer.

Here is the full story, and note this:



A prodigious reader explains how he retains the best information from everything he reads↩︎ David Evans
       The BBC has an odd new list of The 100 Cold River stories that shaped the world -- whereby almost all the 'stories' are full-fledged books. 
       They invited: "108 critics, scholars and journalists from 38 countries" to each: "nominate up to five fictional stories they felt had shaped mindsets or influenced history" -- and admirably they do at least also show who these folks were, and who they nominated, here. 
       It's unclear what the exact instructions were -- name any five ? or the top five ? and "shaped mindsets or influenced history" makes for a pretty big field -- and the answers were all over the place (or, in many cases, limited to very specific places ...); perhaps the biggest surprise to me is that, despite several Chinese classics getting lots of (Chinese) support, The Story of the Stone (aka The Dream of the Red Chamber, etc.) didn't rate at all -- but then the question wasn't what's the bestor most impressive work of fiction ..... 

If you hit LX period you start to understand that Philip Roth was right about  Mortality: "It's a Bad Contract, and We All Have to Sign It" | Exclusive in the Literary Hub

 Edward Feser: The Church permits criticism of popes under certain circumstances
For so many prominent faithful Catholics publicly to criticize a pope seems unprecedented, though perhaps the criticism Pope John XXII faced from the theologians of his day was somewhat similar. However, for a pope to make so many problematic statements while persistently ignoring repeated respectful requests for clarification iscertainly unprecedented.  Hence the criticism is not surprising.  More to the present point, it is manifest from Donum Veritatis, canon law, and the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas and other approved theologians that the criticism is clearly within the bounds of what the Church permits.  Those who accuse these critics of being “dissenters” or disloyal to the Holy Father are either being intellectually dishonest or simply don’t know what they are talking about.
 
A truism is a saying that is so commonly accepted as true that it needs no further explanation.  For example: "never get involved in a land war in Asia.”  Today’s lesson shows us a tax truism: never take tax advice from the person selling you the deal.  In RB-1 Investment Partners, Eric Reinhart, Tax Matters Partner v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2018-64 (May 14, 2018), the taxpayer received millions of dollars from the sale of a business and invested in a complex transaction that the promoter promised would magically wipe away the gain with no actual economic loss (except fees).  When the taxpayer got caught, it conceded the merits, but attempted to avoid imposition of a 40% penalty under §6662 by arguing reasonable reliance on an opinion letter from the law firm promoting the scheme. I explain below the fold the taxpayer’s argument, why it failed, and what we can learn

Informal Inquiries: This blog, like Jacob Marley, is deader than a door nail

Kobi Kastiel (Tel Aviv University) & Noam Noked (Chinese University of Hong Kong), The ‘Hidden’ Tax Cost of Executive Compensation, 70 Stan. L. Rev. Online 179 (2018):
The sweeping tax reform enacted in December 2017 will significantly increase the tax cost of executive compensation in publicly held corporations where the compensation for each of the top five executives exceeds $1 million. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that these corporations will reduce the executive compensation to offset the increased tax cost, which will likely be shifted to public shareholders.

Tessa Davis (South Carolina), Tax and Social Context: Legal Fictions Within Tax, 4 Savannah L. Rev. 31 (2017):
There is a widely-held and oft-disputed concept of tax exceptionalism—that tax is an area of law apart. The idea may be expressed in the view that tax administrative law is not bound by the same restraints as administrative law more broadly or simply in a vague sense that the study and practice of tax are categorically different than other “traditional” areas of law such as criminal law or contract law. If accepted, this view might suggest that tax law and policy is a poor fit for a symposium on American Legal Fictions. Legal fictions are most often theorized in areas of judicially driven law. Statutory law, by contrast, dominates tax. Perhaps, then, tax law is an area in which legal fictions are less frequent and less relevant.
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