Thursday, October 11, 2007

Extremely lucky travel day

Today I flew roundtrip NYC - Boston to present my new paper on tax and accounting at Boston College Law School, where I saw various old friends in the biz (Diane Ring, Jim Repetti, David Walker, Marjorie Kornhauser). Given the storm sweeping up the East Coast, I was astonishingly lucky in how it played out for me - I could easily have spent hours in the airport but actually saved time due to the travel delays. On a normal travel day I would have returned on the 3:30 shuttle, but because the 2:30 was delayed I managed to board it and leave Boston at 3. Back in NYC the Marine Air Terminal (where the Delta shuttle lands) was an absolute horror show, jammed with people and with one of the longest airport cab lines I've ever seen. But I caught a ride back with a limo driver who had lost his scheduled pick-up due to the wall-to-wall canceled flights from DC and Chicago, and who also proved a wizard at the sort of shortcuts through backed-up traffic that I resent when I am one of the other drivers. Plus I heard his very interesting life story, or at least the dramatic highlights.

Either I'm living right or the gods are making up for the pulled hamstring I suffered while playing tennis last week. Or else perhaps neither. (And do I owe the gods for those gnats in Cleveland game 2?)

One thing I like about my paper, in the course of presenting it, is that the proposal I offer (a 50% adjustment of companies' taxable income towards their financial accounting income, with a few miscellaneous bells and whistles) has some interesting pluses and minuses that - rightly, I think, from an expositional standpoint - I don't fully explore in my paper, as they would make it too long and ponderous. Maybe others will choose to write about the proposal if it gets off the ground sufficiently. I am also increasingly persuaded that it makes basic sense, at least enough to get off the ground as a serious contender even if in the end one might choose not to adopt it. (Although I myself would adopt it.)

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