Tax Chats
Taxes touch every aspect of society, including who rules, where factories are built, what people drink, what car they buy, when they have children, and when they die. Scott Dyreng (Duke) and Jeff Hoopes (UNC), two accounting professors, chat about taxes, including current events, with the energy of an over-caffeinated chihuahua. Listening is guaranteed to be far more entertaining than actually paying your taxes.
Episodes
Recent research suggests that the Laffer curve is less curve-like than originally thought. Jeff and Scott talk with Jared Walczak from the Tax Foundation about the Laffer Curve, and why we think it is mesa-like, based on his writing here: https://thesaltroad.net/p/the-laffer-mesa.
Jeff and Scott talk about wasteful tax expenditures with Calvin Johnson, which Professor Johnson believes includes basically all tax expenditures.
Jeff and Scott chat with Brian Galle about his new paper, How to Tax the Ultrarich. Most proposals that seek to tax the very wealthy differently eliminate the principle of realization, such as wealth taxes or mark-to-market regimes. These approaches carry considerable baggage, including liquidity problems, valuation problems, and related concerns. By contrast, Brian proposes a tax that eliminates some of the v...
Jeff and Scott speak with Charles Crain, Managing Vice President of Policy at the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). Charles works closely with NAM’s member companies to advocate for tax policies that support manufacturers and strengthen the manufacturing sector. In this episode, Jeff and Scott first discuss the important matter of how to pronounce NAM (NOT like Viet-NAM). They then discuss NAM...
Jeff and Scott chat with Ben Jaros, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, about his paper, “Tobacco Tariffs in the Colonial Chesapeake.” Ben explains how tobacco tariffs shaped the finances of colonial Maryland and Virginia, the English Crown, and the broader Atlantic economy from the early 1600s through the Revolutionary War. We discuss who actually bore the burden of these tariffs, why European ...
Jeff and Scott chat with the CEO of BlueJ, an AI-powered tax research tool, about updates on BlueJ. Scott announces that BlueJ now offers their product free for tax professors.
Jeff and Scott chat with Elena Patel about the Tax Policy Center, where she is co-director. We talk about the history of the TPC, who works there, and its mission.
Jeff and Scott interview Danny Werfel, a former IRS commissioner under President Obama and President Biden. They talk about his background, the request from President Obama and Biden that he lead the IRS, challenges and opportunities he encountered at the IRS, and what he would change about the agency if he were IRS King for a day.
Jeff and Scott talk with Tyler Menzer, an assistant professor of accounting at Texas Christian University, about his recent research on cryptocurrency tax reporting. In the project, Tyler submitted the same set of cryptocurrency transactions to multiple crypto tax software and reporting services, many of which present themselves as tracking or reporting tools rather than tax preparation providers. He found tha...
Jeff and Scott chat with Mike Kaercher, Deputy Director of the Tax Law Center at NYU Law, about where tax law comes from. We often refer to “tax law,” but in this episode we unpack what that actually means—how the Internal Revenue Code, Treasury Regulations, and court cases, all the rest, all fit together, and who actually writes the words on the pages we consider to be tax law.
Jeff and Scott chat with Conor Clarke, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, about the Supreme Court case challenging President Trump’s sweeping tariffs imposed by executive order. The key questions are whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act authorizes the types of tariffs President Trump has put in place, if it does, whether Congress can delegate tariff-setting power th...
Jeff and Scott chat with Joe Thorndike about how the United States moved from relying heavily on tariffs to building the modern income-tax-based system we know today. Joe is a tax historian and journalist, and writes for Tax Notes, where he writes widely on the history and politics of U.S. tax policy. They walk through the political and economic forces that made tariffs both attractive—and eventually unt...
Jeff and Scott talk with Jason DeBacker about his new paper, Learning from 25 Years of Changes in Business Tax Policy (with Aerfate Haimiti). Jason is an associate professor of economics at the University of South Carolina and the director of the Policy Simulation Library, an open-source effort that helps researchers and policymakers analyze policy. They discuss his work at PSL and what the last 25 years of business...
Jeff and Scott chat with David Mitchel, a Senior Fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, about the small business stock exclusion, recent changes to it, and an article that David wrote with Kyle Pomerleau about why we should get rid of it.
Luke 2 tells us that Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem "to be taxed", and while there, the baby Jesus was born. But, what do we know about that taxing from history? Did everyone travel? What was the general tax environment in the Roman world at the time? Did they actually remit a tax, or, what was the purpose of this trip? Jeff and Scott chat with Roman historian Anna Dolganov about these questions, and more.
Jeff and Scott talk with Justin Schein. They discuss Justin's newest film, and the issues and questions it brings up. Justin's newest film is Death and Taxes, which "is a feature documentary about wealth, inequality and the American Dream, viewed through the lens of the estate tax and the very personal story of a father and son at odds over what kind of inheritance we want to leave our kids and our country."
Le...
We start by explaining the Tax Chats DC Tour, 2025, an exclusive live event!
Then, Jeff and Scott chat with Pete Sepp, President of the National Taxpayers Union. They talk about the work the NTU has done in the past, and what it currently does, including advocate for legislation that is beneficial to taxpayers and engaging in litigation the NTU believes will bring about taxpayer-friendly changes. Pete gives advice to...
Jeff and Scott chat with Ajay Mehrotra, law professor at Northwestern, about the economist Edwin Seligman. They discuss Seligman's academic legacy, his views on progressive taxation, his influence on Columbia University, his students, and his views on tax policy.
Jeff and Scott chat with Marc Goldwein, who is the Senior Vice President and Senior Policy Director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. They chat about Medicaid, a huge piece in the federal government's budget, and an essential piece of understand what needs our tax system must satisfy. They talk about the program in general, ways in which it was recently reformed under the One Big Beautiful Bill, an...
Jeff and Scott chat with Anna Dolganov, an academy scientist at the Austrian Archeological Institute, about her work on a recently re-discovered papyrus. The papyrus contained notes from a tax evasion trial in ancient Rome, which Dr. Dolganov translated. We discuss taxes in ancient Rome, Jewish tax revolts, how to evade taxes on the goods Rome taxed (including human slaves), and what we can learn from the papyrus ab...
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