Sad news

Earlier this week, former House of Representatives Legislative Counsel Ward Hussey died. Ward was the chief person responsible for actual drafting of the Internal Revenue Code from at least the early 1950s through the Tax Reform Act of 1986.

That sounds like a left-handed compliment at best (then again, I'm left-handed and it's a strong part of my identity). But in fact it is a straightforward compliment. Ward was not responsible for the often stupid policies that he was charged with executing. Nor was it his job to make the Code easy for casual readers to scan (an impossible task in any event, given the microscopically variegated rules that Congress continually demanded). Rather, his main job was to get it right so that it worked technically, including when it was being read by sophisticated tax lawyers who wanted to get it wrong, to their clients' advantage, if they were left the room to do so without acting in entire bad faith. Often this involved ensuring that huge Rube Goldberg machines did in fact have all their moving parts working in sync - where the parts might include prior Rube Goldberg machines, implemented in past years' legislation, that needed to continue operating alongside the new ones.

He also had to turn vague ideas into statutory language, where the proponents hadn't properly thought through what they were doing. A classic example from just before my time, which I believe was his work (unless John Buckley, working with him, did it), involved deciding that the building rehabilitation tax credit should be drafted to require, in its definition of rehab as distinct from new construction, that three of the preexisting outer walls remain in place. As a matter of basic policy, perhaps a tax credit based on keeping three of the outer walls intact doesn't make enormous sense. But that wasn't his call. He was presented with a vague statutory concept and had to make it feasible to implement, and he did.

Think of all the different social policies that are pursued through the Internal Revenue Code, or the fantastic complexity of a cops-and-robbers realization-based income tax with taxpayer move followed by government counter-move, then taxpayer counter-counter-move (like Spy vs. Spy in accounting lingo), and one can start to understand how challenging it was for one person to be in charge of House-side drafting of absolutely everything in the tax law. Against that background, and of course with the help of his own staff (e.g., John Buckley) plus the Joint Committee on Taxation and the House and Treasury staffs, he did a fantastic job.

On a more personal note, I well remember working with him on the Tax Reform Act of 1986. I was a Legislation Attorney at the Joint Committee, which I had joined just before work started on the 1986 Act, and was still perhaps a bit green behind the ears (the cliche I've chosen over "young cub.") I was warned before going to my first House drafting session: "You'd better know what you're talking about, and also try to be concise, or Ward will be all over you." It's not so much that he tested the young 'uns, as that they had to prove that they deserved his professional esteem. He knew all too well how sloppy and self-infatuated young staffers can potentially be. After the initial trial period, I felt that I had succeeded and indeed that he liked me, which was a relief.

You'd all be in there sitting around an enormous table. The JCT people, deferring as needed to the House majority staffers, would explain what something was supposed to do. He'd ask questions and listen for a while, then grab a piece of chalk and start working on a big green chalkboard, taking ideas but very much in the lead.

Somehow he reminded me of a benign Burgess Meredith (whose best-known roles to me at the time were as the Penguin in the Batman TV show and the fight manager in Rocky). I wish I could have seen him again, and I'm sorry that he is gone.

Quick, get them a law prof or economist before they embarrass themselves further

On the New York City subway today, I saw the following ad:

"Freelancers pay twice the Social Security tax that traditional workers do. And yet, we don't feel any more secure. Weird."

Followed by a plea to go the website of the Freelancers Union, which is "working to make freelance fair."

Somebody give these guys an F, as in "fuddled." The so-called double tax creates neutrality rather than bias as between freelancers and employees, given the employer share of the payroll tax. Indeed, it's even adjusted to take account of excluding the employer share from the payroll tax base.

If it makes the Freelancers Union feel any better, they can tell themselves that, when they pay that double Social Security tax, they are actually wearing their self-employed employer hats for half of it.

Gilbert and Sullivan's Lord Poobah would understand. "Let's go over there where the Lord Chief Justice [or one of his other multiple titles] can't hear us."

Foreign tax credits

I'm nearing completion of a short, somewhat preliminary, but I think also provocative and surprising yet correct, article entitled "The Case Against Foreign Tax Credits." Not ready to post it, but the time may come fairly soon.

Waiting for 2012

No, that isn't a presidential election reference. I'd predict that Obama is reelected (running against an actual or simulated loon) after tough midterms in 2010, but that's not what I have in mind here. By now the 2009 elections are so earlier-this-week anyway, whereas last night's baseball travesty remains fresh for another few hours.

The 2012 reference, rather, is to when I am hoping baseball's owners will lock out the players after expiration of the current labor contract.

OK, I am not actually hoping for a lockout, but there is no other realistic scenario for restoring the basic competitive balance that fairness and equity demand - no, strike that, let's say instead that consumer principles of enjoyable viewership require, among people with basic good taste.

The $210 million Yankees will presumably be adding Lackey and Holliday this offseason (unless they prefer Jason Bay). Perhaps a few others as well. How long before they add Cliff Lee? And I wouldn't be surprised if they get Utley in a couple of years. This is what they generally do with people who have hurt them in the postseason. They will also continually get their pick of the big money international free agents, such as from Cuba and Japan.

Maybe they'll even find a way to add LeBron. (Insert smiley face here.)

The other 29 teams get to squabble over whomever the Yankees decide they don't want. This isn't really a formula, at least to my taste or any that I find easy to understand, for interesting competition.

A lockout of, say, one full season plus half of the next would be well worth it, from my standpoint, if it meant that baseball competition subsequently would be more like that in football and basketball. (I'm hoping LeBron will come to the Knicks, but think it's great that (a) this is far from certain, and (b) the Knicks can only get him within the salary cap that applies to all.) If this hurts my team, the Mets - just imagine what baseball's dumbest organization could do with only a median budget - so be it.

Available for free - unused paper title

"Tagging" is a popular idea in tax policy scholarship these days. The idea goes back to a 1978 paper by 2001 Economics Nobelist George Akerlof, called "The Economics of 'Tagging' as Applied to the Optimal Income Tax, Welfare Programs, and Manpower Planning." The idea is finding observable attributes (tags) that correlate, e.g., with high income earning ability, and basing tax burdens on that. An example might be a height tax.

With that in mind, I've come up with a paper title that almost doesn't need that good a paper to justify itself. Offered to the world, as I don't plan to use it. Perhaps it would be a political economy piece about the perils of the approach?

"You're It, I Quit: The Truth About Tagging."

True to life?

Two novels I've read this month - Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children and David Lodge's Deaf Sentence - appear to be building towards unpleasant or even horrific climaxes for the lead characters, but then they kind of trail away instead. I half-wanted the worst to happen, though also finding the prospect painful. Traditional plot structuring would have suggested ending with explosions rather than damp firecrackers (though Messud's 9/11 ending is hardly comforting). I suppose they picked the quieter endings in order to avoid formulaic predictability (like when showing the gun in Act 2 means that someone's going to use it in Act 3). But there's nothing wrong with earning a dramatic payoff so long as you can keep it fresh and surprising.

All three of them

They're getting along better these days, though Seymour and Buddy still stage the occasional squeakfest or batting practice. We are still building the trust level with Seymour (look what 7 years have done for us with the once-shy Ursula). Constant love-bombing gradually breaks down their defenses. A la Ringo Starr, who once scribbled that his favorite type of person was "Enyone who likes me."



Buddy




Ursula






Seymour

Meanwhile, back at the ranch ...

I had almost forgotten that the bizarre witching hour for a one-year disappearance of the federal estate tax is almost at hand. Under current law, the tax will entirely disappear on January 1, 2010, and then return to life at its pre-2001 levels on January 1, 2011.

If economics researchers had political clout, they would definitely lobby for the retention of this bizarre anomaly, which could permit testing of Joel Slemrod's and Wojciech Kopczuk's noted and infamous finding (which won them the coveted Ig Nobel Prize in economics in 2001) that the timing of death is tax-responsive. (Slemrod and Kopczuk note that their data does not permit them to distinguish between the hypotheses of actual change and merely reported change in the timing of death.)

But speaking more seriously, this is a crazy and irresponsible thing to do. Imagine a very wealthy individual, without a surviving spouse, in an irreversible coma. The time is somewhere between Christmas and New Year's Eve, just over two months from now. Suppose this individual is ready to go and has even left a clear-cut living will, but that dying before the new year would cost the family $50 million of estate tax.

Luckily, I've never been faced with making decisions about a family member in these horrendous circumstances, but I have known a couple of gerontologists who get angry about excessive use of "heroic" measures, when they feel it's hopeless, disrespectful of the dying person's wishes, and being done simply because the family isn't ready to let go.

However one comes out on end-of-life care questions (and it is a true minefield), we surely don't want an estate tax thumb on the scales.

Now fast forward to the midnight hour of December 31, 2010. If Congress still hasn't done anything, living an hour longer could cost a given family $50 million of estate tax. And there are really discretionary choices people can make, well short of illegal euthanasia. E.g., provide antibiotics or not, keep the food tube going or not. Once again, this really is not a choice we want anyone to face with huge estate tax consequences in the background.

In a sane and rational political world - perhaps on the planet Zircon - Congress, if unable to address a permanent solution in the time left to it, would simply extend the 2009 estate tax rules for a year and then try to make a final decision in 2010. To be sure, continuing one-year extensions of the 2009 rules, needing to be lobbied for each time, would be a risk and itself a bad outcome. But certainly one worth taking in late 2009 if Congress is unable to address the issue seriously before the end of the year, as seems quite likely.

But will the Obama Administration try to push this? There may be political costs and benefits they need to evaluate, especially given the number of balls they already have up in the air. Would a one-year extender lead to a Senate filibuster? (My uninformed guess is yes.) Would they be able to break the filibuster? (My guess is no.) So perhaps we are going to get the mad research experiment after all.

My own take on where we ought to end up on the estate and/or inheritance tax is that there is enough empirical evidence that people under-plan for it to make it an optimal piece of the overall toolkit, even if one were to assume that the net revenue and distributional consequences of repealing it were zero due to the ability to make offsetting changes to other instruments, e.g., the income tax. But that is a separate question from whether or not to let this crazy one-year window pop open.