Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Another Example of Why 48 States See Florida as a Joke

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

It appears one of the three most powerful political figures in Florida, overseeing a nearly $70 billion budget, has an attention span rivaling an oat bag.

Jeepers, you would have an easier time getting a straight answer out of the dearly departed Moammar Gadhafi than Florida Senate President Mike Haridopolos, who has taken prevarication, misdirection and willful amnesia to heights of fantasy Lewis Carroll could only dream of.

The noted author of the publicly funded $152,000 tome on Florida politics, Lassie Goes to Tallahassee, admitted a few days ago he fibbed, obfuscated and otherwise engaged in a full Pinocchio when he denied to a reporter knowing anything about a payoff to get rid of former state Republican Party chairman Jim Greer, who had treated the job as if he were a Kardashian on steroids.

But in a sworn deposition connected to a lawsuit brought by Greer against his former employers, Haridopolos now admits he was less than truthful about the proposed, but unconsummated, $124,000 settlement. The acclaimed author of Tallahassee: Indian for ‘Where’s My Check?’ said he thought he wasn’t supposed to talk about the back-room deal.

Why not? Everyone else was.

— Daniel Ruth, St. Petersburg Times, Haridopolos' selective amnesia.

PS. Why just 48? There’s always Alabama.

Posted in Florida, Politics: The Party of Sleaze | Comments Off

Debunked

Posted on November 28, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Real World Test Show That Android Task Killers Are Still Useless.

Had me fooled.

Posted in Android | Comments Off

Links to Postings on L’affaire Segal

Posted on November 28, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

A surprising number of foreign academics have emailed me over the past few days to ask what I thought of David Segal’s attack on law schools in the New York Times the other day. So here are no-friend-of-the-status-quo Jim Chen’s links to David Segal’s critiques of legal education and the academy’s reaction. To which I would add pointers to Bodie, Kerr, Leiter, and Pasquale.

There is of course much to critique and improve in law school education. And the economic model looks increasingly uncertain. But Segal’s articles are so uninformed and so error-ridden that all they do is set back the necessary debate.

Update: add Krakoff to the list.

Posted in Law School | Comments Off

Step One in Tax Shelter Reform, a (Very) Modest Proposal for Transparency

Posted on November 27, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Today’s NYT article on how the Estée Lauder heir Ronald S. Lauder uses tax shelters to protect his billions reminded me of An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%:

A highly complex set of laws and exemptions from laws and taxes has been put in place by those in the uppermost reaches of the U.S. financial system. It allows them to protect and increase their wealth and significantly affect the U.S. political and legislative processes. They have real power and real wealth. Ordinary citizens in the bottom 99.9% are largely not aware of these systems, do not understand how they work, are unlikely to participate in them, and have little likelihood of entering the top 0.5%, much less the top 0.1%. Moreover, those at the very top have no incentive whatsoever for revealing or changing the rules. I am not optimistic.

(Incidentally, there’s some other interesting stuff there, including a rich-person’s view of why the 99.5% and up are so different from the bottom half of the top 1% (ie. 99.0 – 99.5). That group is mostly very successful professionals who find their retirement prospects to be better than most, but still less certain than they would like. The top 0.5%, on the other hand, the writer says, are or were in finance.)

While it would be good to do some serious reform of the tax system, the vested interests are in fact all pushing hard the other way (e.g. the quiet concerted action to destroy the inheritance tax).

Perhaps, therefore, as a first step we could require that anyone who uses a tax credit or deduction that saves them more than, say, $250,000 in tax liability, must disclose what tax credit/deduction they used, how much they saved and have it recorded along with their names on a registry published online, in a nice searchable format, by the IRS. There is a long tradition of having tax returns private, but perhaps for this we should change it: if you want to keep your privacy, don’t take the tax shelter. Note that my proposal does not require that the taxpayer disclose either income or total tax liability, just the size of the savings and its source.

As I’ve said before, I’m not at all a tax lawyer. I invite people who know more about tax law to explain why this idea is unworkable, pointless, or fattening.

Posted in Econ & Money, Law: Tax | 8 Comments