Wall St. Journal: “Well-heeled investors, beware: The auditors are coming. An Internal Revenue Service unit set up to look at wealthy taxpayers and their complicated financial arrangements has started rigorous probes of some hedge-fund managers and other investors it suspects may be trying to evade taxes.”
Megan McArdle has a story in Atlantic arguing that the U.S. should dump the corporate income tax. “The FT has a piece today on the administration’s plans to lower the corporate income tax rate in exchange for simplification–getting rid of a bunch of deductions. This is a decent plan–and not just because it’s the Full Employment for Policy Pundits Act of 2011–but this seems like a good time to once again charge into the fray and argue that we ought to just eliminate the damn thing altogether.”
Forbes: “A divided three-member New York State Tax Appeals Tribunal has upheld an administrative judge’s finding that billionaire hedge fund pioneer Julian H. Robertson Jr. wasn’t a resident of New York City in 2000, saving him $27 million in tax. . . . The appeals decision and the $27 million hinged on Robertson’s whereabouts on just two days. According to the previously unreported 62-page decision issued last month, before taking an apartment in the city in 1996, Robertson was warned by advisors not to spend more than 183 days in the city, or he’d be taxed as a city resident.”
Amity Shlaes in Bloomberg: “The estate tax is one topic getting lost in the dust of the midterm races. That’s a pity. This tax, now quiescent, is set to roar back like a stallion in 2011 if lawmakers don’t rein it in with new legislation. The destruction caused by the estate tax can be hard to capture. This is partly because the family business dynamic, so affected by the tax, is also hard to describe. Nonetheless, if left unchecked, this levy can trip up not only the workings of a family enterprise but also the general economy. An entertaining reminder of this fact is a film [Secretariat] in theaters this midterm autumn.
New York Times: “Denture wearers will get a tax break on the cost of adhesives to keep their false teeth in place. So will acne sufferers who buy pimple creams. But nursing mothers will not be allowed to use their tax-sheltered health care accounts to pay for breast pumps and other supplies.”