Brian Galle

@bdgesq.bsky.social

175

Followers

276

Following

148

Posts

Georgetown law prof guy. Mostly boring tax stuff; occasional dollops of nonprofits, law & econ, and other shiny objects that temporarily occupy my attention (e.g., a 15-month stint at the SEC for some reason). Could be arguing in my spare time.

Posts Replies Media

AYFKM, OU Press?

Ok, my #Moore takeaways. 1. Most of the stuff the income tax does today is probably ok. Yay, let's take our Ws where we can find them. 2. Kav & the Chief def are not promising to uphold a mark-to-market tax. Indeed, they are not saying anything so loudly that probably the opposite is true.

Justice Thomas's #Moore dissent, and its love for silly metaphors instead of, you know, actual tax policy, gonna make everyone who teaches federal income tax sad. Probably a feature not a bug for him. See, e.g., papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... @omrimarian.bsky.social

Does your conference come with a boat ride? No? You are doing it wrong.

Don't know why people say there aren't enough summer holidays when we are about to celebrate Tax Workshop Weekend ... this year co-locating the Association of Mid-career Tax scholars (AMT) and the Experienced in Tax Conference (EITC). It's like when Passover and Easter are on the same day, people.

As an extra fun twist on this saga, if the petitioners (the Moores) win in their pending supreme court case, the whole underlying statute fpotus is resting on here is probably unconstitutional. www.propublica.org/article/trum...

IRS Audit of Trump Could Cost Former President More Than $100 Millionwww.propublica.org The tax agency concluded in its long-running investigation that Trump effectively claimed the same massive write-off twice on his failed Chicago tower.

This story about Trump-adjacent charities is a fun final exam question for a nonprofits class. It looks to me like self-dealing that was carefully lawyered to avoid the most easily-enforced prohibitions on self-dealing. /1 www.nytimes.com/2024/05/06/u...

Right-Wing Nonprofit Paid Millions to Companies With Ties to Insiderswww.nytimes.com The Conservative Partnership Institute’s three highest-paid contractors had connections to the group’s leaders or their relatives, raising concerns about self-dealing.

New essay from me in the Atlantic: A (hopefully) more accessible version of the work that I, @davidgamage.bsky.social and Darien Shanske have developed on why and how states should tax the very wealthy. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

The Myth of the Mobile Millionairewww.theatlantic.com The notion that rich taxpayers will flee if the state comes for their money is mostly fiction.

Peer review is frustrating and takes forever. But then sometimes you see a law review article from a junior scholar place in a top journal when that article is a hash of (uncited) old arguments and (unacknowledged) long-refuted arguments, and you just sigh.

I worked on the climate rule. I'm not revealing any insider knowledge here, I think, to note that this article saying the climate rule was "watered down" because of lobbying is missing, ahem, a Major Question. You mught even say a MQ Doctrine. www.nytimes.com/2024/03/05/c...

This is the paper 👇 where we explain the new Vermont proposal to tax wealthy individuals each year as their assets accumulate value. And why you should read peer-reviewed academic studies, not newspaper headlines, for the real skinny on whether taxes affect where most people live.

New WP alert! “Money Moves: Taxing the Wealthy at the State Level” papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... (forthcoming @CalifLRev) This is of course joint work with @dgamage and Darien Shanske. I guess no one makes long threads on Bsky so I'll just paste the abstract here and take questions...

More coverage of the Vermont mark-to-market bill, more reporters who don't understand it isn't a wealth tax. abcnews.go.com/Business/ver...

Reposted by

Brian Galle

As the Times reported yesterday, Vermont has a new bill to tax its wealthiest citizens on a mark-to-market basis. www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/u... We've prepared an unofficial section-by-section summary of the bill here: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Vermont H. 827 Unofficial Section-by-Sectiondocs.google.com

Back when IRS actually enforced tax law for nonprofits, this was the kind of repeated and pervasive self-dealing that sometimes lost organizations their exemption. It's kind of amazing that we are all the way to the eve of a state-law trial and there is not even a whisper of a tax audit.

In June 2009, the NRA’s treasurer enlisted the group’s longtime PR firm to obfuscate executives’ extravagant spending. We obtained a secret audio recording of that meeting. In partnership with @propublica.bsky.social:

New Recording Shows NRA Treasurer Plotting to Conceal Extravagant Expenses Involving Wayne LaPierrewww.thetrace.org At a meeting in June 2009, the treasurer of the National Rifle Association worked out a plan to conceal luxury expenses involving its chief executive, Wayne LaPierre, according to audio of the meeting...

Tfw you are about to hit enter on the merge command with your 24m- observation dataset. This cannot possibly go well, right?

It turns out to be pretty easy to dodge state income tax, if you are already rich enough to defer payment to later. taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog... But states don't have to put up with that. Nothing requires them to follow federal "nonqualified deferred compensation" rules.

TaxProf Blog: Shohei Ohtani’s Contract Could Save Him $100 Million In Taxes — And Start A Silico...taxprof.typepad.com The Athletic, How Shohei Ohtani’s Contract Could Save Him $100 Million in Taxes — And Start a Silicon Valley Trend: Shohei Ohtani copycats might start popping up soon — and not only in baseball,...

Hey, are you a billionaire who has just decided to stop giving your money to one of the lowest marginal-return places you could possibly put a charitable dollar? Have you considered funding pre-K instead? research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcont...

Friends, imagine that an academic institution was offering to name a piece of furniture in your honor, and they allowed you to choose the honorific. E.g., "The Wealthy Donor Barca Lounger in ___." What would you put in the blank, assuming you were a boring tax professor?

This www.propublica.org/article/clar... was a bit too late for my tax exam, but in case you were wondering, a payment to keep a desirable service-provider in place (e.g., to support a radio station) is not a "gift," per several old cases, and so is taxable to the recipient.

Clarence Thomas’ Private Complaints About Money Sparked Fears He Would Resignwww.propublica.org Interviews and newly unearthed documents reveal that Thomas, facing financial strain, privately pushed for a higher salary and to allow Supreme Court justices to take speaking fees.

Some interesting reporting on the Hunter tax indictment, including a copy of the 2018 return that is the source of the only really serious allegations. www.businessinsider.com/hunter-biden... I agree with the quoted experts that these charges are not ones DOJ would usually bring.

Exclusive: Hunter Biden's tax returnswww.businessinsider.com Hunter Biden's 2018 tax return, published here by Business Insider, complicates the narrative laid out by Special Counsel David C. Weiss's indictment.

It's the prerogative of law professors to opine on things about which we know little. I do it all the time! But if you are writing about a pending SCOTUS case, maybe at least make sure your description of the facts is not playing into one party's misleading framing? www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/o...

Opinion | Want to Tax the Rich for Real? Pay Attention to This Supreme Court Case.www.nytimes.com Why the court should not give favorable tax treatment to the wealthy.

A few thoughts about prosecuting "failure to pay" tax cases. Many people are confused about what that offense even comprises. It means: you accurately reported your income, but then didn't pay the resulting tax bill. So it's not tax fraud, and often not "evasion," the most serious tax offense. /1

Granted I was only at DOJ 3 years, but I have literally never seen a prosecution for failure to pay individual income tax. One of the few reported cases (involving a dude who didn't pay for 20 years) says that failure to pay prosecutions are "rare." My eyebrow is raised.

I have taken a step or two back from the ledge. Several conservative justices sound like they are trying to settle on factors that would let them say there was realization here, assuming that is a constitutional requirement.

Kavanaugh sounding more sympathetic to SG Prelogar, helping her to explain her view of the precedent and saying he "agrees" with her view of the history.

Roberts (in so many words): Is there any way we can rule for you and still be able to strike down a wealth tax?

Not to be alarmist, but I count no more than 1 conservative justice with skeptical views of the Moores (Gorsuch asked some questions but seemed more to be helping the Moores to give good answers).

Justice Kagan just asked this question.

1. "Why isn't that this case?" Petitioners have staked a lot on their effort to distinguish a tax on them (supposedly based on “mere ownership” of their stock) from a concept they made up called “constructive realization.” This concept of constructive realization does a lot of work for them. /2