Welcome to My Blog
I’m a retired legislative analyst who worked for the Research Department of the Minnesota House of Representatives for over 40 years. WARNING: if you stumble on this blog and decide to read it, my posts are often long and always boring. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
I write mainly about the issues that I worked on:
- Individual income taxes
- Corporate income taxes
- Tax exempt bonds
- Tax increment financing
- Tax expenditures
- Pensions and retirement plan financing
- State and local government finance
- Legislative process and related legal issues
Matt Levine on Epstein and his putative tax planning genius
This is a verbatim copy of the section of Matt Levine’s Money Stuff newsletter (9/16/2026) in which he muses about Jeffrey Epstein’s putative tax planning genius. He (Levine) appears in the Epstein files, which may be why he wrote it. I found it sufficiently interesting, as well as like much of what Levine writes clever…
What tax gap?
Times is out with story on the IRS’s failure to publish tax gap estimates.
States helping the feds (maybe)
Anyone who reads my blog knows I’m concerned about the kneecapping of the IRS in various ways (underfunding, DOGE chaos, massive layoffs and retirements, leadership carousel, etc.). It’s bad for federal revenues. An unappreciated side effect is the adverse effect on state income and corporate tax compliance and revenues. States align their taxes with the…
Immediate feedback
DOGE + IRS budget cuts = reduced enforcement revenues
Great Wealth Transfer
On the cusp of the great wealth transfer by the baby boom, it’s time to rethink the repeal of the federal estate gift tax for all but the top 0.1%. Doing so would be progressive and would modestly reduce the federal debt bomb we boomers are poised to leave the next generation. Most legislative discussions…
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