Memoir now live

My memoir, "Now Is Now and Then Is Then," has gone live on Kindle for a mere $4.99. 

Memoir now almost live

Today I self-published my memoir, Now Is Now and Then Is Then, on Kindle Direct Publishing. Kindle price $4.99, but not available for perhaps another 72 hours. I'll add a print-on-demand paperback option next week; couldn't do so today due to formatting issues.

Quandary

 Over the last few months, I've written a fairly interesting and unique literary work (if I do say so myself). It's a memoir, covering the period from my very first memory through age 29, when I both met my wife and got my first academic teaching job. Tentative title: "Portrait of an Academic as a Young Man."

The distinctive thing about is that it consists entirely of vignettes, which average about 500 words each. There are 114 in all, and the total is just under 58,000 words. I aim at a very rounded self-portrayal - as the cliche goes, warts and all. It focuses broadly on my emotional, social, romantic and intellectual development, culminating in my finding myself, and coming to understand why the path I ultimately chose was right for me. Each vignette places the reader in the room with me, and they generally end with a twist or payoff that brings out the essence of each of the rendered experiences.

The initial feedback that I've gotten from readers is extremely positive. E.g., I have been told that reading it is like having potato chips or chocolate chip cookies on the table – it’s always easy to read just one more vignette, and then the one after that.

Naturally, I would like to publish it. But my initial efforts have been frustrating. The university presses that I've contacted, where they have some idea of who I am, all said that it's not within their scope. And here are a couple of responses from agents to whom I sent it unsolicitedly:

"There is much to enjoy here .... But regardless of my personal feelings, I'm afraid this strikes me as a challenging project for which to find a publisher, your interesting insights notwithstanding. Afraid I'm going to pass here."

And: "You have an interesting idea for a book and there’s a lot to like about your approach. But, in the end, I’m afraid I [won't be able to interest a publisher.]"

I totally understand. These folks are trying to make a living by successfully placing books that will make money. And I suppose it's naive of me to think that literary merit and high readability wouldn't count for more. But still, it's disappointing re. the current state of the publishing world (not to mention, for the book's prospects).

Fingers crossed, as there are still other agents and book publishers to whom I've sent it. But I'm not enormously optimistic. My fallback plan is to self-publish it on Amazon Kindle, a free service that would offer it electronically (at a price of my choosing) andl as a print-on-demand physical book.

I'd love to hear from anyone who is interested in the manuscript or has any thoughts to offer about the project.

2024 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium

With the start of NYU's fall 2024 semester, I thought I should offer an update here on the public sessions at our 2024 Tax Policy Colloquium.

All sessions will meet on Tuesdays, from 4:15 to 6:15 pm, in Furman 310, and most or all will be followed with small group dinners that generally include the speakers.

Here is our schedule:

1) Tuesday, September 10 – Ellora Derenoncourt, Princeton University Economics Department. Wealth of Two Nations: The US Racial Wealth Gap, 1860-2020.

2) Tuesday, September 24 – Andrew Hayashi, University of Virginia Law School. The Federal Architecture of Income Inequality.

3) Tuesday, October 8 – Manasi Deshpande, University of Chicago Economics Department. The (Lack of) Anticipatory Effects of the Social Safety Net on Human Capital Investment.

4) Tuesday, October 22 – Louis Kaplow, Harvard Law School. Optimal Income Taxation and Charitable Giving.

5) Tuesday, November 12 – Alex Zhang, Emory University School of Law. Fiscal Citizenship and Taxpayer Privacy.

6) Tuesday, November 26 – Natasha Sarin, Yale Law School. Broken Budgeting.

An exciting change for this year, compared to the last couple of years, is that the sessions will be on Zoom, and Zoom attendees will be able to participate live. The key change here is that New York State has changed its rules for live class attendance such that a class isn't disqualified as live instruction just because a remote participant asks a question.

I had stopped putting the sessions on Zoom, because that rule made the whole thing just too crazy and hard to manage. Under the prior regime, all that Zoom attendees could do was post a comment that I would then have to read for them. That I found just too difficult while also running a live queue, but I can certainly handle combining my live queue with Zoom attendees raising their hands to ask questions.

Chat GPT's progress over the last year and a half

About 18 months ago (I remember the time because I was visiting at U Va Law School), I briefly got interested in how Chat GPT makes things up. E.g., I asked it what my novel Getting It is about. It confabulated in response that it's about the need for broad-based tax reform, etcetera. (Which, needless to say, it is not - the program generalized from superficial knowledge of my other work.)

Since I gather that Chat GPT improves exponentially over time, I decided just now to give it another try. Here is what I got regarding Getting It:

"Getting It" by Daniel Shaviro is a satirical novel that delves into the life of a Wall Street tax lawyer named Bill Doberman. The story explores themes of ambition, greed, and the pursuit of success in a corporate world where ethics often take a backseat to self-interest.

"Bill Doberman is the novel’s protagonist, a middle-aged lawyer working for a prestigious Manhattan law firm. Despite his outward success, Bill is deeply dissatisfied with his life. He feels stuck in a career that he once thought would bring him fulfillment, but instead, he finds it hollow and unfulfilling. The novel follows his journey as he navigates the cutthroat world of corporate law, where manipulation and deceit are commonplace, and personal and professional lives intertwine in complex and often damaging ways.

"As Bill struggles with his own moral compass, he becomes increasingly aware of the compromises he has made to "get it"—success, wealth, and status. The novel critiques the American Dream by portraying how its pursuit can lead to moral and personal decay.

"Shaviro uses sharp wit and dark humor to portray the absurdity of the corporate world, making "Getting It" not only a commentary on the legal profession but also a broader critique of contemporary society's values."

[Back to me] Okay, this comes closer than before. But a few quibbles: (a) Doberman is a DC, not a Wall Street lawyer, (b) he is not a tax lawyer, (c) he is young not middle-aged, and (d) he does not become dissatisfied with the cutthroat world he inhabits. That may come later, the ending hints, but only due to the limited nature of what he has won. And related to this last point, hopefully it's less cliched in the actual novel to have us, but not him, understand how hollow and unfulfilling his "triumphs" are.

So evidently Chat GPT is still fantasizing and filling in the gaps, but it's coming closer than it did before.

Good news and bad news from the Supreme Court's Moore decision

Today the Supreme Court released its decision in Moore v. United States, upholding the 2017 tax act's mandatory repatriation tax (MRT) on foreign source income (FSI) of American-controlled foreign corporations. The MRT was eminently sensible in principle, although far from perfectly designed in practice, in that the applicable FSI had previously been subject to deferral - i.e., it would be taxed to the US shareholders upon repatriation. Cashing out the deferred tax when you eliminate it, even if at a reduced rate, is very difficult to argue against on policy grounds.

Right-wing activists nonetheless challenged the MRT here on the grounds that (a) the income was unrealized by the taxpayer, and (b) per the long-discredited 1920 Supreme Court case of Eisner v. Macomber, realization is constitutionally mandated for a tax on income to fall within the protective scope of the 16th Amendment.

While the Supreme Court may initially have granted certiorari in response to right-wing fulmination about shutting down the constitutionality of unapportioned wealth taxes and extension of the federal income tax to unrealized gains on publicly traded assets before such taxes were even close to adoption, it soon became clear that the case was a potential nuclear weapon wiping out trillions of dollars of revenue - e.g, from original issue discount (OID) bonds or the flow-through taxation of partnerships. And this was a nuclear weapon that even the likes of Paul Ryan thought it would be insane to set off.

The taxpayers' advocates sufficiently sniffed the air around them to realize that they could only win the case (if at all) by making very limited claims that targeted the MRT in particular while distinguishing it from taxing partnerships, using subpart F to tax US corporations on their controlled foreign affiliates' (mainly passive) income, etc. While this sufficiently limited their theory's "blast radius" (as the majority opinion puts it) to keep its adoption by the court from being immediately catastrophic, it also fatally surrendered coherence and credibility. The provisions that the taxpayers agreed were constitutional simply could not be distinguished from the MRT.

Good news: the Supreme Court upheld the MRT in a quite sensibly written opinion by Justice Kavanaugh. The vote was 7-2. What the opinion does is say that the MRT is not about realization at all: the income being taxed unambiguously has been recognized at the entity level. So the case is merely about apportionment, not realization. The opinion notes longstanding precedents that permit an entity's income to be taxed either at the entity level or directly to the owners. And, given the basis for decision, it holds that issues about taxing unrealized income simply aren't reached here.

Bad news: the Supreme Court has at least 4 votes (and possibly as many as 6) in support of the proposition that Eisner v. Macomber's idiotic and long-renounced "realization / severance" requirement for treating economic income as taxable income is indeed binding constitutional law. Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch, offers his usual brand of dishonestly cooked "history" in support of the taxpayer in Moore on realization grounds. Meanwhile, Justice Barrett, joined by Justice Alito, concurs only in the judgment, and only on the ground that the taxpayers' concessions in distinguishing the MRT made their position unsustainable.

Will the Court soon hold that it is unconstitutional to tax income from OID bonds, on the ground that it hasn't been realized? Or if not income from OID bonds, then at least the unrealized gains of very wealthy individuals, as per a bill recently introduced by Senate Finance Chair Wyden? There may well be 4 votes for striking down one or both of such provisions.

Kavanaugh's opinion expressly declines to reach that question, rightly noting that it's unnecessary to decide Moore. One can reasonably presume that both he and Chief Justice Roberts are potential 5th and 6th votes for holding that realization is constitutionally required. Meanwhile, only Justice Jackson, in a concurring opinion that no other justice joined, stated forthrightly that there is no realization requirement in the 16th Amendment.

So let us express relief about the present, along with continued concern about the future.

Henry Simons and pre-World War libertarianism.

 I just posted this piece on a libertarian-affiliated U of Chicago website. Based on a 2013 article that I wrote concerning Henry Simons. It discusses the question of why a Friedrich Hayek-affiliated "classical liberal" would have supported both vigorous anti-monopoly enforcement and a high-rate progressive income tax - positions that are anathema to the likes of (say) a Richard Epstein or Milton Friedman (if he were still alive) today.