Now that a once-obscure J.P. Morgan Chase derivatives trader named Bruno Iksil has become infamous as the London Whale, I suppose it is time to ask whether what he does should be subject to new taxes. The question predated Mr. Iksil’s misadventures, of course. Ever since the U.S. financial crash of 2008 and the beginnings of [...]

At first glance, it looked like President Obama and congressional Republicans were miraculously headed in the same direction on corporate tax reform. Reform plans by Obama and GOP leaders such as House Ways & Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) seemed simpatico. Both sides embraced lower rates. Both endorsed ending business tax subsidies, through neither had much to [...]

Here’s what I love about President Obama’s Framework for Business Tax Reform: His diagnosis of the problem is spot on. In just a few pages, the Treasury Department does a marvelous job describing what’s wrong with the way the U.S. taxes business. Anybody interested in understanding why the tax code is such a mess should [...]

For a while there, I thought President Obama was going to embrace tax reform in his State of the Union address.  Instead, following the lead of his predecessors, he offered a laundry list of new tax subsidies, bragged about some old ones, and said almost nothing about a top-to-bottom rewrite of the Tax Code. Here’s just [...]

Mitt Romney’s holdings in the Cayman Islands have generated lots of interest in investment funds that are managed from the U.S. but incorporated in foreign jurisdictions.   But taxable U.S. investors like Romney don’t get much benefit from such funds.  The real winners are U.S. tax-exempt entities, such as charities, pension funds, university endowments, and IRAs, [...]

In another one of those bad ideas that never seem to go away, Congress may be about to grant a huge tax break to multinational companies that have stashed earnings in their foreign subsidiaries. A temporary tax holiday for firms that return those profits to the United States is the latest evidence that bipartisanship is [...]

In a shouting match with a demonstrator at the Iowa State Fair yesterday, GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney argued against raising corporate taxes, asserting that “Corporations are people.” He’s right, of course, in both the legal sense—the law treats corporations as if they are people—and in the economic sense—what happens to corporations affects people. Corporations [...]

In Washington, bad ideas never go away. Now two old tax breaks have resurfaced with the ostensible goal of creating jobs, despite plenty of evidence that neither actually works. One would create a payroll tax break (aimed at employers instead of workers this time). The other would grant a temporary tax holiday to multinational corporations that [...]

This morning, a panel of veteran international tax experts tried to put the U.S. struggle to fix its corporate tax system in broader perspective. Unfortunately, they concluded that the U.S. is lagging well behind the rest of the world in corporate reform and, worse, the odds of any serious progress anytime soon are slim. The [...]

Will Donald Trump bring Barack Obama’s birth certificate to the Royal wedding? I have no idea, but now that I’ve made our Web optimization folks happy, here is another question: What’s the deal with the People’s Budget, the fiscal plan released this week by 80 congressional progressives? The answer is likely to drive less traffic than [...]