Monday, September 03, 2018

UK's wealth rises as land values soar by £450bn in a year


  1. 'Rats chasing their tails': How the law caught up with Philip Whiteman

    Some know him as Philip Graham, Philip Armstrong, Philip James or Philip Whiteman, but to Marisa Sampieri the alleged fraudster is just “evil”.

    True picture of inequality looks bleak for Millennials

    As young people are well aware, we just don’t have wealth

    How The Online Global Gig Economy Threatens Us All

    While freelance websites may have raised wages and broadened the number of potential employers for some people, they’ve forced every new worker who signs up into entering a global marketplace with endless competition, low wages, and little stability. Decades ago, the only companies that outsourced work overseas were multinational corporations with the resources to set up manufacturing shops elsewhere. Now, independent businesses and individuals are using the power of the internet to find the cheapest services in the world too, and it’s not just manufacturing workers who are seeing the downsides to globalization. All over the country, people like graphic designers and voice-over artists and writers and marketers have to keep lowering their rates to compete. … Read More


Steven A. Bank (UCLA), When Did Tax Avoidance Become Respectable?, 71 Tax L. Rev. 123 (2017) (reviewed by Erin Scharff (Arizona State) here)


Robert W. Wood (Forbes), Tax Tips From Manafort Conviction That Might Keep IRS Away:

The conviction of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on eight counts of financial crimes nets the first conviction for Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Political commentators on both sides are jabbering over this. They also have the guilty plea by former Trump fixer Michael Cohen to talk about. But aside from politics, there are some serious tax lessons here for everyone. And they are surprisingly simple.



Jeremy Bearer-Friend (NYU), Should the IRS Know Your Race? The Challenge of Colorblind Tax Data, 71 Tax L. Rev. ___ (2018):
This Article draws from original archival sources to document a century of colorblindness in federal tax data.

Orly Mazur (SMU), Taxing the Robots, 46 Pepp. L. Rev. ___ (2018):
Robots and other artificial intelligence-based technologies are increasingly outperforming humans in jobs previously thought safe from automation. This has led to growing concerns about the future of jobs, wages, economic equality and government revenues. To address these issues, there have been multiple calls around the world to tax the robots. Although the concerns that have led to the recent robot tax proposals may be valid, this Article cautions against the use of a robot tax. It argues that a tax that singles out robots is the wrong tool to address these critical issues and warns of the unintended consequences of such a tax, including limiting innovation. Rather, advances in robotics and other forms of artificial intelligence merely exacerbate the issues already caused by a tax system that under-taxes capital income and over-taxes labor income.
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