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
April IRS Update
Budget proposal, settlement negotiations begin in Trump lawsuit, CEO’s fight over sports memorabilia, filing seasons stats, and more IRS news
ETF Tsunami
ETFs are eroding the income tax base – much faster than I expected when I wrote my first post on this in 2021. This erosion, resulting from Congressional inattention and regulatory decisions, flies under the radar and swamps many explicit tax cuts that attract much more public attention. Warning: this post collects, organizes, and archives…
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.
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