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
Incongruity
A recent Fox News poll reveals the popular misperceptions that underlie the fiscal insanity that has the federal budget in a death grip.
Roth v traditional IRAs
An X post causes me to mount a favorite hobby horse: why I think the Roth structure is flawed retirement policy. It magnifies lucky investment winners with bigger subsidies, while punishing losers with lower ones. On a lifetime income basis, it must make the system more regressive.
Fraud Framing
This is my attempt to provide a little tax centric context for the discussions of fraud in Minnesota social services programs.
March IRS update
Trump lawsuit NY Times headline that has to be an understatement: Justice Dept. Struggles to Respond to Trump’s Suit Against I.R.S. (3/31/2026). Excerpts (my emphasis added): The Justice Department is struggling to decide how to respond to President Trump’s lawsuit demanding at least $10 billion from the I.R.S., as the department’s lawyers try to resolve…
Tariff Case
The result was predictable; the statute’s words mean what they say. Its main significance is negative. Upholding the tariffs would have had big effects, politically, economically, and legally. Striking them down, not so much. The case IMO is not a counterexample to the Court’s path of rewriting the constitution to give presidents more negative power…
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