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
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.
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
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