New short video

Here you can watch my cat Gary steal the show as I discuss a recent tax paper of mine with Leandra Lederman and Allison Christians on their new short video series, Break Into Tax.

New book forthcoming next year

I've signed a contract with Anthem Press for the publication of my most recent book, currently titled Bonfires of the American Dream in American Rhetoric, Literature, and Film. Anthem also published Literature and Inequality. Currently scheduled to come out in May 2022.

The book includes 3 main case studies. The first discusses Russell Conwell's Acres of Diamonds speech and the John Galt speech near the end of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. The second discusses The Great Gatsby, with reference not just to the text itself but also its changing reception across the decades. The third discusses the films It's a Wonderful Life and The Wolf of Wall Street.

The new book is only half as long as Literature and Inequality, and more tightly focused. L & I not only had a much broader canvas but also was engaged in making the methodological case for such studies. Here much of the focus is on what features of our national culture across time could have brought us to where we are now.

Recent short explainers

 I have recently posted a couple of sort "explainer" pieces on websites that cover ongoing issues.

First, on the Just Security website run by my NYU colleague Ryan Goodman, I posted this piece on the Weisselberg indictment, aiming to correct misperceptions in the press that this was merely a technical or politically motivated "fringe benefits" case, rather than an assertion of rampant fraud that no responsible prosecutor could reasonably decline to file. This one got much broader coverage than reflections I post on this blog, so it probably isn't news to most of my readers here.

Second, last night Econofact.org posted a short solicited piece of mine entitled "Taxing Multinational Corporations." Here the question of interest is as follows:

"In debates regarding higher versus lower corporate income taxes, an important issue is the impact that changes in either direction would have on the level of domestic investment, and consequently on economic growth, the strength of the labor market, and government revenues.... What do economic reasoning and recent experience teach us about the effects of corporate tax rates on investment and economic growth in a global environment?"

This one dovetails nicely with an article in progress, entitled "The Economics, Law, and Politics of Increased Taxation of Multinationals" that I presented this past Friday at the Indiana-Leeds Summer Zoom Tax Workshop Series. I will probably post a draft of this on SSRN soon, but thought that I would advance it closer to a final draft first. That is the piece I will most likely be workshopping this fall at places such as the National Tax Association (although it might conceivably be superseded in some settings by other stuff that I'm working on now). It's fairly crisp, short, and I hope readable, and I might aim to publish it in Tax Notes, although it's not impossible that I might aim instead for a tax law review, especially one with decently quick turnaround.