On the road again

Today I am at Tulane Law School to present a lunch talk (Presidents' Day notwithstanding) regarding my paper, Should Social Security and Medicare Be More Market-Based?  I've made slides for the 50-minute talk regarding this paper that I will be presenting at the University of Illinois Law School on Monday, March 4 (two weeks from today), which I'll post in due course, but I won't be using them today anyway, as the format is more NYU Tax Policy Colloquium-like (Shu Yi Oei will present or summarize the paper, and I'll then offer a brief response before we move on to discussion).

Our next NYU Tax Policy Colloquium session won't be tomorrow, but the following Tuesday (Feb. 26), as NYU follows a Monday schedule tomorrow to make up for the Monday holidays.  The speaker will be Peter Diamond.

Meanwhile, I am stunningly close, at long last, to completing my book Fixing the U.S. International Tax Rules.  It's taken me four years, and four fresh starts after the initial one.  I've never had this experience before - all my books have gone pretty fast once I had conceptualized them - but this time I struggled with the proper normative framework and analysis, reflecting that the defects in the literature have forced me to do a whole lot of fresh thinking (not comparably necessary, say, when I wrote my book Decoding the U.S. Corporate Tax).

My international tax book will be discussed in a conference at Hebrew University Law School this coming June.  I will also need to look for a publisher.  I had been thinking that I might like to use the Urban Institute Press, which published Decoding, but their publishing operations have apparently been scaled down.  A good university press is presumably the best way to go.  I hope and believe that the book will have significant readership and sales, with good potential for use by classes, both in law schools and elsewhere, that are studying tax policy and/or international taxation.  But it certainly isn't aimed at mainstream commercial publishers.