Taxes touch every aspect of society, including who rules, where factories are built, what people drink, what car they buy, when they have children, and when they die. Scott Dyreng (Duke) and Jeff Hoopes (UNC), two accounting professors, chat about taxes, including current events, with the energy of an over-caffeinated chihuahua. Listening is guaranteed to be far more entertaining than actually paying your taxes.
Send us a text Tax Chats is officially one year old! In honor of this anniversery, Scott and Jeff talk through a potential rebranding of Tax Chats with a different name, then go on to discuss two tax headlines. First, they discuss windfall profits taxes on oil companies, then talk about the disclosure of Donald Trump's tax returns. Jeff also misuses the Spanish verb "recordar."
Send us a text In this episode Scott and Jeff discuss Sales Taxes with Whitney Afonso . We discuss sales tax basics, including the difference between who remits the tax and who bears the burden of the tax. We discuss the purposes of sales taxes. We discuss the regressivity of sales taxes. And we discuss how even Fancy Nancy had to deal with the unexpected pain of sales taxes in Shoe-la-la!...
Send us a text In this episode we talk about the tax consequences of student loan forgiveness. Generally, debt forgiveness is treated as income, and is therefore taxable. If the Biden Administration's current plan to forgive portions of student loans comes to fruition, the forgiven amount would normally be taxable. Provisions have been made to make student loan forgiveness tax free at the federal level. Some states, including North Carolina, would still treat the loan forgiveness as taxable, and...
Send us a text Scott and Jeff discuss recent headlines from the New York Times: Opinion | There Is a Tax That Could Help With Inflation - The New York Times (nytimes.com) The Purpose of Extra-Large Marshmallows? A U.K. Court Weighs In. - The New York Times (nytimes.com) Lawsuit Seeks to Block Biden’s Student Debt Cancellation Plan - The New York Times (nytimes.com) Endowment Tax on Wealthiest Universities Netted a Fraction of Predictions in 2021 - WSJ...
Send us a text Scott and Jeff discuss several people Jeff has invited to be on the show, but who have (as of yet!) been unable to make a Tax Chats appearance. Scott guesses why Jeff invited each person to be on Tax Chats. The "John Edwards Tax Shelter", gas taxes and electric vehicles, soda taxes, and taxing assault rifles are all briefly discussed.
Send us a text Scott and Jeff discuss Pillar 1 of the OECD's Inclusive Framework with Heydon Wardell Burrus of the Centre for Business Taxation at Oxford University.
Send us a text Scott and Jeff chat with Larry Zelenak, Professor at the Duke Law School about taxes in sitcoms. Larry has documented the extensive list of episodes that use the federal income tax as a major component of the plot. His work documenting these facts can be found in these two articles: " Six Decades of the Federal Income Tax in Sitcoms " " Seven-Plus Decades of the Federal Income Tax in Sitcoms: An Update " In the episode, we refer most frequently to three episodes: 3Rd Rock From the...
Send us a text In this episode, Scott and Jeff discuss the some of the fascinating details related to the taxation of tobacco. We often think of the tax system as a tool to raise revenue. But the tax system is also used to encourage or discourage behavior. Taxing tobacco is one example of this type of tax, but the existence of the tax creates many strange incentives that affect the way people behave, including, counterintuitively, smoking more under some circumstances....
Send us a text Jeff quizzes Scott about the tax status of the Royal Family in England. Long live the Queen.
Send us a text Despite our best efforts to inform the world about the perils of taxing financial statement income, the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax based on financial accounting income passed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. Jeff and Scott discuss the adjustments to financial accounting income that are part of the act, and describe how these adjustments will result in a situation where some firms will report high profits to shareholders and low or no tax, despite the minimum tax....
Send us a text Scott and Jeff discuss a program called Tax Inspectors Without Borders with Rusudan Kemularia, Head of Tax Inspectors Without Borders. The program is part of the OECD and is connected with the OECD's BEPS as part of an effort to help provide developing countries with the tools necessary to enforce tax laws in the complex international tax arena.
Send us a text Jeff and Scott discuss some interesting tax-related observations Jeff made while visiting Oxford University and Mannheim University in England and Germany.
Send us a text Scott and Jeff discuss the $80 billion in additional funding that has been allocated to the IRS as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA. They also discuss the fact that the IRS owns and uses a variety of guns, ammunition, etc. They break down some of the fear-mongering headlines that have recently been in the press.
Send us a text In this special episode, we compile several recordings that we have made over the past year related to the proposed alternative minimum tax on financial accounting earnings. The recordings are very much related to two op-ed articles Scott published in the Wall Street Journal, found here: Don’t Let Warren Politicize Accounting - WSJ Elizabeth Warren’s War on Accounting - WSJ Jeff has also written on the topic, including this letter to congress and an accompanying WSJ article that g...
Send us a text Scott and Jeff discuss "carried interest" with Vic Fleischer , Professor of Law at UC Irvine. Carried interest is a special type of income that is taxed at favored capital gains tax rates, and is often associated with high earning individuals who manage private equity partnerships. One prominent example of someone who had significant income from carried interest was former presidential candidate Mitt Romney....
Send us a text Scott and Jeff learn from Ashley Jackson how the Taliban create a tax. We discuss how the tax system evolved initially to generate revenue to fund the Taliban objectives, until it became a symbol of its legitimacy. We talk about how the tax system evolved from a system of forced extractions to the point where customer support numbers became available to report mistreatment....
Send us a text Scott and Jeff discuss the creation of schedule M3 with Lillian Mills , Dean of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. Lil was instrumental in the creation of schedule M-3, which is form filed with the IRS that reconciles taxable income to financial accounting income. We talk about the opportunities that exist for academics, policymakers, and regulators to work together, and the unique environment that led to the creation of the M3. We also discuss so...
Send us a text Scott and Jeff discuss some of the prominent arguments against progressive taxation.
Send us a text Scott and Jeff discuss the tax status of churches in the U.S. with Lloyd Mayer, Professor of Law at Notre Dame University. We discuss the basics of tax law as it pertains to Churches. We also discuss special tax benefits that apply to ministers and other church employees. We consider the tradeoffs that exist between providing churches with tax benefits and relying on them to provide certain types of public goods and services vs taxing churches and relying on the government to prov...
Send us a text Scott and Jeff ask Andy Grewal to describe administrative law, and why it is so important for taxes. We discuss how significant portions of tax laws are left to interpretation by the IRS or Treasury, and how these interpretations can have a material effect on the experience of taxpayers.
Send us a text Scott and Jeff discuss income shifting by multinational corporations with Jennifer Blouin. We talk about Jennifer's research that suggests some estimates of the amount of tax revenue the U.S. loses to income shifting are as much as ten times too large. These estimates are important because they drive policy discussions, including debates in the U.S. about tax reform, and abroad, through the OECD and other organizations. The conversation builds on some of Jennifer's recent work rel...
Send us a text Scott and Jeff discuss the effects the tax rate has on how much taxes are raised with Professor Arthur Laffer, for whom the Laffer Curve is named. The Laffer Curve shows the likely relationship between tax rates and tax revenue. We hear the famous story of drawing the curve on a napkin . We ask Professor Laffer about the Laffer Curve, and we get his opinion on the revenue maximizing tax rate....
Send us a text Scott and Jeff are joined by Rita de la Feria @delaFeriaR to discuss her new paper (co-authored with Maria Amparo Grau Ruiz) called " Taxing Robots ". The abstract of her paper reads in part: "In recent years, the idea of taxing robots has been progressively gaining momentum. The potential impact of automation on employment, and consequently on income tax revenues, has led many to defend the introduction of a tax on robots, or on the use of robots, to either compensate for the pot...
Send us a text Scott and Jeff discuss whether the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) was effective. Often referred to as the Trump tax cuts, or the Trump Tax Reform, recent commentators have argued that it was highly effective. For example, Tyler Goodspeed and Kevin Hassett argued in the Wall Street Journal the TCJA "delivered as promised" by increasing investment, wages, and government revenues. Academic research, however, paints a more nuanced picture. Jeff keeps a list of academic studies that eval...
Send us a text Scott, Jeff, and Paul Kiel discuss the series of articles published by ProPublica based on a massive leak of private tax return data on the wealthiest individuals in the United States. The series of articles can be found here: https://www.propublica.org/series/the-secret-irs-files . We ask about privacy, transparency, tone, influence, leaked data, and more....
Send us a text Jeff explains why quarters have ridges, and what it has to do with taxes and inflation.
Send us a text Scott and Jeff discuss the idea of carryover basis with Kathleen Thomas. Currently, when someone dies with appreciated capital gains, they get a step-up in basis, meaning their estate pays no taxes on their accumulated gains. The downside is they have to die. An alternative would be to carryover the basis the the person who died had, which would make many tax planning strategies more difficult....
Send us a text Scott and Jeff discuss Biden's proposed Mega Millionaire Minimum Tax with David Gamage, one of the thought-leaders behind the proposal and its variations. We discuss the basics of what the minimum tax might look like. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this type of tax. The tax is intended to force very wealthy individuals like Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg to pay more tax, even if they do not have much income as currently the tax code currently defines income. We also dis...
Send us a text Scott and Jeff discuss progressive taxation. While most agree progressive taxation is desirable, there is less agreement about how much progressivity is desirable, what it even is, and if our current tax system is progressive. Scott and Jeff tackle these issues by asking each other questions about taxes on income, property taxes, taxes on cigarettes, and other scenarios. They conclude that progressivity is a slippery subject, and, claims about progressivity should be carefully con...
Send us a text Scott and Jeff discuss the reasons a corporate tax makes sense. The answers might surprise you. Among the least compelling arguments: corporations have a lot of income, corporations use infrastructure, corporations have special legal status. Among the most compelling arguments: corporations make efficient collection agents, corporations have cash, and taxing corporations allows the government to see what they are up to....
