Year-end activities

Yay for the holiday season; it's about time. This has been a tough last couple of months in some ways, for me as for our country.

In terms of my professional activities, my forthcoming book, LITERATURE AND INEQUALITY: Nine Perspectives from the Napoleonic Era Through the First Gilded Age, remains on-track for April 2020 publication by the Anthem Press. Copy-editing has begun.

In mid-January, I'll be traveling to Singapore to give a lecture at the NUS Faculty of Law as Sat Pal Khattar Visiting Professor of Tax Law. It will concern my work in progress, Digital Services Taxes and the Broader Shift From Determining the Source of Income to Taxing Location-Specific Rents. A final version of the piece will then appear in the Singapore Journal of Legal Studies. The lecture time is long enough that I'm preparing, and will post here, significantly longer and fuller slides than I have posted upon giving briefer talks concerning the piece.

My new article in process is well underway, albeit perhaps ready for seasonal hiatus. Its current working title is What Are Minimum Taxes, and Why Might One Favor or Disfavor Them? It will discuss, inter alia, what one might call the "Mortimer Adler" problem with using minimum taxes, how minimum taxes might be defined (and why minimum tax-ness might matter), and it will discuss in this regard institutional manifestations that include at least the following:

(1) the AMT,

(2) standalone versus minimum tax structure for taxing public companies' reported financial statement income, with reference to the 1987-1989 AMT preference that was based on book income,

(3) the BEAT,

(4) GILTI (along with worldwide/foreign tax credit systems that are structurally similar, albeit typically not called minimum taxes if they tax foreign source income at the full domestic rate), and

(5) other global minimum taxes, such as the OECD's Pillar Two proposal.