My John McCain story (such as it is)

I just belatedly remembered that I have a John McCain story of a sort. It goes back to 1997 or so, and is perhaps more about TV, media, and promotion than McCain as such, but he did, from my standpoint, have an amusing cameo in it.

At the time, I had just published my book Do Deficits Matter?, and the publisher was seeking to help me get publicity to boost sales. So I got a call from a booker from Good Morning America, asking me if I wanted to appear on the show and apparently get a chance to discuss deficit issues briefly.

I said yes, even though I had to get there, pre-show, at something like 5:30 in the morning, which was no fun. I also had an Income Tax class to teach that morning, but say it was at 10, so I knew I'd get to it on time.

When I arrived at the show, I found out that I had been misled by the booker, who just wanted to have warm bodies in the room. They were going to be discussing deficit issues with a visiting celebrity, none other than John McCain, and they invited all members of the audience to submit proposed questions on index cards. 2 or 3 would then be pre-chosen to ask their questions live on the show. I didn't bother to submit, but I also, out of curiosity, didn't leave. I was feeling a bit grumpy by this point, however (despite scoring loot in the form of a free Good Morning America t-shirt).

They also had another guest on the show who had become a celebrity. She had actually worked in the same law firm as me, and indeed in the office next to mine, and we had been on friendly terms. I remember thinking that it would have been nice to go over and say hello to her, off-camera, except that security would have hustled me out pronto, long before I could get within eyeball range. The consequent feeling of relegation to plebe status added, I suppose, to my resentment about being there.

When the show was over, McCain, being a professional politician, came over to shake hands with all the plebes in the studio audience. I shook his hand but didn't leave right away, because I was hoping to talk to someone who worked for the show about the dragooning that I by now so resented. Then I said to myself, the hell with it, and decided to file out. This brought me within a few feet of McCain, who was still lingering and talking to people. We made eye contact, and he growled at me, kind of angrily, "I already shook your hand!"

My thought at the time was: With all due respect, it's not as if shaking your hand is such a great thrill that I'd be angling for an encore. So get over yourself, if you don't mind. Once was quite enough for me, just as it understandably was for you.

This then lingered as the event's final indignity, although the whole thing had turned comic in my mind by the time I got to my tax class.

Review of my international tax article

Many thanks to David Elkins for his thoughtful discussion / review of my new international tax article (on broad priniples and the 2017 tax act in particular) in today's Tax Prof blog, available here.

Random musical aside

I happened to hear recently, for the first time in a while, one of my all-time favorite songs, Sam Cooke's Bring It On Home to Me.  Looked it up on Wikipedia to learn more about it, and gleaned several fun facts:

--It was only a B side.  The A side was Having a Party - obviously a far lesser song, although one can understand what the record company was thinking.

--The backup vocalist with the deep voice, whose call-and-response interplay with Cooke is so powerful, was Lou Rawls.

--The piano player, who does his part so beautifully although it's simple enough that I suppose any really first-rate session pianist could have nailed it, was Ernie Freeman, who did a lot of jazz, pop, and R&B records and worked with Woody Herman, Duane Eddy, and Frank Sinatra, among others.

--Cooke must not initially have realized how good a song it was, as he offered it to fellow singer Dee Clark, who turned it down.

Act soon when supplies start

Subject only to a bit more light editing, I seem to have finished, at last, a complete draft of the book on literature and high-end inequality that I started in 2014.  I'm usually a fast writer, but in this case I had to spend years deciding exactly what I was doing and learning how to do it well. Plus a whole lot of disparate research was required for each new topic.  And I wrote long chapters that I subsequently deleted from the project and published separately as freestanding law review articles.  Etcetera.

My current working title is Dangerous Grandiosity: Literature and High-End Inequality Through the First Gilded Age. This, too, has changed multiple times in the course of the project.  I would certainly be willing to discuss alternative title suggestions with a publisher, as they can often come up with something crisp and salable.

Whether or not this book is either the best or the most important thing I've written, I think it is my favorite, although this partly reflects the particular tastes and values that led me to write it. (I can be very self-critical, although I generally prefer to keep that to myself.)

I've talked with a couple of editors / possible publishers in the past, but before I had fully nailed down the project. My aim was not just to gauge interest, of which I found some, but also to get feedback, which several gave generously and which I found very helpful.

The book clearly has more upside sales potential than my tax policy books, but also less of an automatic built-in audience, and I don't have the same instant cred when doing something like this as when writing about, say, corporate or international tax policy. That's fine, I'm willing to earn it and feel that the book is up to this challenge. (And I've gotten positive feedback about particular chapters.) But I do now face the question of how best to go about publishing it. E.g., university press versus high-brow independent press, and it really needs the right fit to get its best shot at landing audibly.

International tax policy article, part 2, posted on SSRN

I have just now posted on SSRN the second part of my recent Tax Notes / Tax Notes International article discussing U.S. international tax policy.

It's available for download here.

The abstract goes something approximately like this: "This paper, published in Tax Notes on July 9, 2018, is the second half of a two-part paper examining and analyzing the three main international provisions in the 2017 tax act. Part 1 discussed normative frameworks for international tax policy. Part 2, contained herein, focuses on the base erosion and anti-abuse tax (the BEAT), global intangible low-taxed income (GILTI), and foreign-derived intangible income (FDII)."

I am thinking that this may be of greater practical interest than Part 1 to people who are looking, not just for an overview of the major international tax provisions in the 2017 U.S. tax act, but also for what I would say is a genuinely evenhanded assessment of its purposes, virtues, and defects, including suggestions for how the above rules might best be changed if one took as given the broad-gauged policy views that appear to have motivated them.