Thursday, October 18, 2012

What to expect when you're not expecting

Today I gave a lunch talk in midtown Manhattan, at the Covington Retreat for International Tax Executives, entitled "The Prospects for Corporate and International Tax Reform: What to Expect When You're Not Expecting."  Slides (which I used as lecture notes rather than as slides) that give a detailed overview of my talk are available here.

The basic topic is why I don't expect major corporate and international tax reform to happen - or, if it happens, to be very stable - not just for obvious political reasons but also due to the fundamental dilemmas we face once we are forced, by the existence of the individual income tax, to sign on to entity-level corporate income taxation.

Among other things, it offers first-ever full details of the fictional "Shaviro tax reform plan," which I confidently assert could and would happen shortly, apart from the unfortunate fact that it actually can't and won't happen.  (This is a device to help explain why changes that depart from it, by reason of being administratively feasible as it is not, are inevitably so unsatisfying.)

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