This viewpoint criticizes a recent Tax Court decision, Bulas v. Commissioner, denying an accountant deductions associated with a bathroom used almost entirely by clients visiting the accountant's home office. The author argues the court interpreted the requirement in IRC § 280A(c) that the...

In Dagres v. Commissioner, decided in March 2011, the Tax Court considered the distinction between business bad debts and nonbusiness bad debts. This article discusses the particulars of Dagres, which presented some unusual issues, and it describes more generally why the distinction matters to...

This piece is part of the author's probably misguided effort to take seriously the Sixteenth Amendment phrase “taxes on incomes.” The piece (in form a letter to the editor, but complete with footnotes!) responds to a reader who had noted that, because of a cap, the basic Social Security...

In Tempel v. Commissioner, decided in April 2011, the Tax Court came to a number of important conclusions about sales of state income tax credits that occurred shortly after the credits had been received. The gain was held to be capital gain (with the court implicitly concluding that the credits...

The idea has gained currency that the Taxing Clause in the Constitution gives Congress the power to do anything, or almost anything, that would be funded by taxation. Most recently, that argument has been advanced in connection with the litigation about the individual mandate in the Obamacare...

This article responds to an argument, made by economist Martin Sullivan, that, if the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate in the Obamacare legislation, all sorts of tax incentives — which, he argues, are economically equivalent to the mandate — would suddenly be at risk...

In a 2011 decision, Tempel v. Commissioner, the Tax Court had held, among other things. that gain on sales of state income tax credits was capital gain. In a Chief Counsel Advice released later in the same year, the IRS accepted the result, and most of the analysis, of Tempel, and it also...

In debates about reorienting the American revenue system, nearly everyone assumes the Constitution is irrelevant. With few exceptions, the tax provisions in the original Constitution - particularly the direct-tax apportionment rule and the uniformity rule - have been interpreted to be paper...

The intersection of buffalo law and taxation hasn't been a busy one, but accidents still happen: not everyone understands that buffalo have the right of way. This article critically analyzes the recent Tax Court summary opinion in Wheir v. Commissioner, which involved a bodybuilder who sought to...