Send us a text

Jeff and Scott take a look at 4 books that Jeff has recently acquired for the Tax Museum library, which numbers at least 677 volumes. Almost all of these books were a an academic bequest from one of Jeff's mentees, Joel Slemrod.  

Jeff introduces four books, asks a question related to the book, and Scott tries his best at answering. The four books mentioned, and the approximate year of their original publication:

Rich and Poor (1898) - Helen Bosanquet

Capital (1867) - Karl Marx

Political Economy (1837) - Francis Wayland 

The National Revenues (1888) - Albert Shaw

Send us a text

 In this episode, Jeff and Scott talk with Anders Anderson, a finance professor at the Stockholm School of Economics about, his research evaluating Sweden’s nationwide e-bike subsidy. The program successfully doubled e-bike sales, but had only a modest impact on reducing car use—far less than survey responses suggested. People bought b-bikes, then didn't really use them. When accounting for actual emissions reductions, the cost of carbon abatement was around $800 per ton, which most people agree is more than the social cost of carbon. We discuss why the policy wasn’t cost-effective and what better subsidies might look like.

Send us a text

Jeff and Scott chat for a third time with BlueJ CEO Ben Alarie about new innovations in tax research using artificial intelligence, especially how these tools are being used by tax practitioners, the efficiency gains to using them, and how BlueJ goes about continually improving these tax research tools.

Send us a text

In this episode, Scott and Jeff chat with Ruth Braunstein about her recent book "My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America" wherein we discuss complicated issues related to using tax dollars to fund controversial issues like abortion and war. We discuss taxpayer resistance. We chat about the complexities that arise in government use of taxpayer dollars when the underlying population is extremely diverse.

Send us a text

Jeff and Scott chat with Kathleen Thomas, a UNC tax law professor, about a recent proposal to allow businesses to have a standard deduction, rather than track expenses. Kathleen explains how this proposal would simplify compliance with and administration of the tax code. 

Send us a text

The House Ways and Means Committee has pass The One Big Beautiful Bill the TOBBB). Knowing this was coming up, Jeff invited Scott to go on a Tax Chats road trip, but, got rejected--Scott was too busy. So, Jeff watched the process from a  distance. Jeff discusses what he observed, and Jeff and Scott discuss the contents of the bill, for far as it was passed by the House Ways and Means Committee. 

Send us a text

Jeff and Scott talk about the relationship taxes have with each other.  How are value added taxes related to sales taxes or the border adjustment tax, and how are all related to income taxes (or are they just unrelated)?  Find out by listening to this amazing episode.

Send us a text

Jeff and Scott talk to Ryan Monarch, economics professor at Syracuse University, about what we know about the tariffs imposed by the first Donald Trump administration in 2018.  

Send us a text

Jeff and Scott chat with Adam Michel of the Cato Institute about tax expenditures. Adam currently has on his X account the Tax Expenditure Madness brackets (also on his substack: https://adamnmichel.substack.com/). Adam sets up brackets like the March Madness NCAA basketball tournament,  but instead of pitting basketball teams against each other to establish the best team*, he has tax expenditures competing to determine which is the worst expenditure. Jeff, Scott and Adam chat about several sets of tax expenditures, and offer their somewhat tongue-in-cheek opinion about which ones are worst.

*For example, by establishing that UNC women's basketball has won a national championship 1 time, compared to Duke's 0 times, or that UNC men's basketball has won the NCAA tournament 6 times, compared to Duke's 5 times. Of note is that of all teams with over 20 games played in the NCAA men's tournament, Duke has the highest winning percentage, which is only to say that they win a lot before they ultimately lose--they choke under pressure in the end.

Send us a text

 Jeff and Scott chat with Bill Gale of the Tax Policy Center about his new paper (with Oliver Hall and John Sabelhaus), "The Same But Different: How the Income Tax Affects Black, Hispanic, and White Households." We discuss how the bottom 70% of Black households, by income, pay less in tax than White households with similar incomes. This occurs because Black households have more dependents, on average, than White households, and children are tax advantaged in the U.S. In the top 30% of households, by income, White households pay less in tax because they are more likely to have tax-advantaged forms of income, such as capital gains. Across the first nine income deciles, Hispanic taxpayers pay less in tax, as Hispanic households tend to have more dependents throughout the income distribution.