SALT Speak – Joel Michael's blog

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

Social Security Fixes

Reducing spousal benefits should be considered as part of the policy debate to shore up social security’s funding.

Potpourri

This post is a dump of a few federal tax items that have recently caught my attention.

Trump v. IRS Update

In the latest installment of this ongoing saga, the Eleventh Circuit denied the plaintiffs’ motion for a stay of Judge Williams’ order (prior post) sanctioning Trump’s attorneys and prohibiting them from referring to it as a settlement agreement. The decision was unanimous (of the three judges two were Obama appointees and one Trump). Politico story.…

Citizenship Qs

Tax administration animated by ideology rather than revenue collection

SNAP, Soda, and SALT

I pick a SALT-related nit with a NBER paper, featured by NYT, on the behavioral effects of prohibiting soda purchases with SNAP benefits. Caring about the efficacy of using SNAP for MAHA-style social engineering seems like a third order concern, when OBBBA put core elements of SNAP in a policy blender.


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