Tax Chats is a weekly podcast hosted by accounting professors Scott Dyreng (Duke) and Jeff Hoopes (UNC). Each episode features conversations with researchers, historians, policymakers, and practitioners about how taxes shape the world around us — from current legislative debates to the history of the tax system and everything in between.
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.
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 value of deferral, which would reduce the incentive to hold assets merely to delay taxation, but still only levies taxes upon realization.