Tuesday, September 04, 2007

D.C. appearance later this week

I will be very briefly in D.C. this Friday (September 7), participating in an Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center-sponsored hearing on taxing carried interests. It will go from 9 to 10:30 a.m., at the Rayburn Building on Capital Hill. Other speakers are Victor Fleischer, William Stanfill, Eugene Steuerle, and Jonathan Talisman.

It looks like the academics/think-tankers have a working 3-2 majority here. Stanfill is a partner at Silver Creek Technology Investors, while Talisman is at Capitol Tax Partners, so I think I can guess (and in Talisman's case I know) how they come out on the issues here.

UPDATE: Steuerle is the moderator, so no doubt sworn to strict neutrality. Call it 2-2, and may the better arguments win. (Actually, I trust it will be more amicable than this, and I certainly don't foam at the mouth on these issues - e.g., I agree that corporate-level taxation matters to the merits of taxing the service partners, and that symbolic yet ineffective fixes wouldn't be worth doing.)

FURTHER UPDATE: I'm back in NYC after the session, and will blog on it shortly. But a quick correction - I certainly got Stanfill wrong, for which my apologies to him. His pitch is that he should be taxed at the full ordinary income rate, not the capital gains rate. Amusing moment in the session: Victor Fleischer was saying that the general partners (GPs) who run these partnerships typically have only a couple of fellow GPs, if any. He asked: "Isn't that right, Bill?" Stanfill answered that he's had fewer since he started testifying in favor of higher taxes on his industry.

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