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Sam Brunson Profile picture
Sam Brunson
@smbrnsn
Georgia Reithal Professor Law, Loyola U Chicago. Mostly taxes, jazz & cooking. Author God and the IRS, https://t.co/2puc6Ej3OE. @smbrnsn@mastodon.world
Sep 18, 2023 • 25 tweets • 8 min read
Today #HunterBiden filed a suit against the @IRSnews alleging that the IRS unlawfully disclosed his tax return info.

So I thought I'd run through the complaint and take a look. (Note that there may be a big break in tweets--I have a meeting shortly.) 1/storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco… Central to the suit is an allegation that two IRS agents regularly went on network and cable news to discuss audits and criminal investigations against Biden and that this behavior violated the tax law.

This is the operative provision: 2/ taxnotes.com/research/feder…
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Feb 10, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Okay, I know that training can be annoying and that it can be necessary.

But this particular Red Flags Rule training may well be the worst I've ever done at @LoyolaChicago. Why? 1/ Because I have no idea how it applies to me as a professor. Essentially, the training talks about flagging red flags as a financial institution, and especially in dealing with customers.

But here's the thing: even if the university is covered (which I assume it is? 2/
Feb 9, 2023 • 45 tweets • 13 min read
I'm thinking I'm going to live-tweet this complaint about Ensign Peak Advisors. Because on the first page it says this: 1/ Image That's decidedly not true. Currently, the IRS audits about 0.41% to tax returns. That number shoots up for the very wealthy and the very poor, but for the vast majority of Americans, they're never going to face an audit. 2/ trac.syr.edu/reports/706/#:….
Oct 14, 2021 • 30 tweets • 11 min read
Okay, I read this so you don't have to.

And responding is going to be really hard because it's basically utterly incoherent. And also, Mr. Vance doesn't understand tax law at all.

Still, let's go through a couple of his assertions: 1/ (1) First, of course, is the creation of "the Left," an organization dedicated to, idk, harassing churches and, um, help fund private business? 2/
Oct 12, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Look, the law school rankings are flawed enough. What possible use could anybody ever have for ranking *elementary schools*?!?

Seriously, this is perhaps the dumbest thing I can possibly imagine. 1/ There is literally nothing good that can come from @USNewsEducation ranking elementary and middle schools, but there is a ton of potential harms, ranging from discouraging teachers from teaching where they're needed to convincing wealthy and white parents that 2/
Mar 20, 2021 • 15 tweets • 6 min read
I get that Turley likes writing about things he doesn't understand. And I sincerely hope he enjoyed writing about wealth taxes because he very clearly doesn't have a clue what he's writing about. A short thread: 1/ First thing: it's hard to argue that a 2-3% tax is "soaking the rich." The S&P has a long-term average return about 9%.

Now admittedly, people with >$50m aren't investing *all* of their wealth. But their investing a lot of it. 2/
Mar 20, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
To be clear, my wife and I together make a very solid living, but solidly below $400k. We live in a major (expensive) city and we actually have one more child than the example.

And we live super-comfortably on our income. 1/ Sure, we couldn't make a go of it if we put our three kids into $40k/year private schools and had a $2 million house. But you know what? My kids' public schools are easily as good as those private schools.

And no, I don't live in a $2m house. Because I'm not an idiot: 2/
Mar 3, 2021 • 15 tweets • 6 min read
So not every word in @bariweiss's op-ed for @DeseretNews is wrong.

But enough are that it merits some response. (This is not, of course, an exhaustive response.) 1/ I honestly can't speak to the origins of the phrase "cancel culture." I suspect, though, that by placing it in the late-80s/early-90s she's ahead of the game.

The concept, though? Existed a long time before early-Millennial. 2/
Mar 2, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I will say that @oren_cass buys hook line and sinker into the idea that the poor are poor because they make poor choices. Presumably he believes that if they made better choices they wouldn't be poor. 1/ Image The problem? His root causes of poverty are kinda unsustainable as root causes of poverty, unless he believes that wealthy people don't suffer from abuse and addiction, unmanaged mental health, etc. Otherwise, I presume, those people would also be in poverty?

But they're not. 2/
Mar 2, 2021 • 5 tweets • 4 min read
For some reason, @nytopinion is happy to let @oren_cass baldly assert that giving money to poor people doesn't solve the root problems of poverty.

This is stupid definitionally: the root problem of poverty is not having money. Giving money fixes that. 1/

nytimes.com/2021/03/02/opi… Image But it's also a stupid throwback to back when economics was purely ideological and not based in empirics. The general emerging consensus is that, in fact, cash aid is an excellent way to help lift families out of poverty. For example: 2/ npr.org/sections/goats…
Sep 29, 2020 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
So some people have been asking @CBHessick why we should care about the president's taxes if everything he's done is legal.

First, it's not clear that everything has been legal. But assume it is/

I assume her interlocutors' feeling comes from the SCOTUS opinion in Helvering: 1/ "Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase one’s taxes." 2/ uniset.ca/other/cs5/69F2…
Sep 28, 2020 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Okay, one more thing before I do the prep work that I really, really need to get done: that $750. #TrumpTaxReturns I don't currently have much substantive to say about it. But I do have a historical note: in 1969, the Treasury Secretary testified to Congress that 155 taxpayers who had income in excess of $200,000 paid no income tax. 2/
Sep 28, 2020 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
One last thing before I shift to preparing for tomorrow's class: the extensions.

This suggests 2 questions: (1) How (or why) did he get extensions? (2) Why did he pay $1m in taxes and then request a refund? 1/ Question 1 first: you know how April 15th is Tax Day? (Or, rather, other than this bizarro year we're living in it's Tax Day?)

Turns out it's not. Or at least it's not Tax _Filing_ Day. 2/
Sep 28, 2020 • 18 tweets • 6 min read
One thing that the @nytimes report on #TrumpTaxReturns that seems weird is his personal guarantees of loans, guarantees that are largely coming due within the next 4 years. After all, guarantees came back to bite him before. So what's up with those? 1/ Last night, @Omri_Marian made a couple important points: there's an advantageous tax reason for doing it and he may not actually be on the hook for the guarantees. 2/
Sep 28, 2020 • 18 tweets • 7 min read
Okay, first things first: let's take criminal tax fraud off the table, shall we? (A friend requested that I not skimp on the GIFs, so also, let's do this in a GIF-heavy thread.) #TrumpTaxReturns 1/ I get that looking to criminal tax fraud is attractive; we've enjoyed using it to prosecute crimes we know about but, for whatever reason, can't prosecute at least since Al Capone. 2/
Sep 28, 2020 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
Okay, just one thought tonight on #TrumpTaxReturns: beware of too-facile conclusions because they're probably wrong.

Here, for instance: it's clearly possible @realDonaldTrump inflated assets and revenues on bank documents for loan purposes. But it's also possible he didn't. 1/ For instance, the fact that he had tax losses doesn't tell us anything about his revenue. In fact, the @nytimes article points out that his businesses had revenue. In 2018, he disclosed $435m in revenue but claimed a tax loss of $47m. 2/
Sep 26, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I wanted to listen to something while I was folding clothes (and towels) and I came across this two-year-old Tiny Desk Concert with Tower of Power.

Which takes me back to high school. 1/ See, I started high school listening largely to heavy metal and hair rock. Slowly that evolved into alt-rock and, like Spin Doctors. (At the same time, I was slowly making my way into jazz.) 2/
Sep 26, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Dear journalists, let me be 100% Frank here: all getting worked up about a religious group calling themselves "handmaids" does is demonstrate your own religious illiteracy.

I don't know anything about People of Praise. But I'm like 99.999% sure that its use of "handmaid" 1/ is an allusion, not to Atwood, but to Luke. Specifically, in the KJV of the Bible, when the angel comes to Mary to tell her she'll be the mother of Jesus, she responds "Behold the handmaid of the Lord." 2/
Sep 25, 2020 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
This is absolutely insane: Palantir is expected to sell its shares at $10/share to the public.

But the thing is, even more than Facebook, than Uber, than any tech company I've ever looked at, shareholders don't have any control over the company. 1/ wsj.com/articles/palan… We're looking at a three-class common stock structure. Class A has one vote per share. Class B has 10/share.

That's all normal enough.

Then we come to Class F. (What happened to C-E? Idk.)

Class F has _a variable number of votes_. 2/ Image
Sep 24, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
So now I've read through most of the bill. And I have questions:

(1) The bill doesn't allow jurisdictions to start counting mail-in ballots until polling opens on election day. Why? What possible purpose could that serve? 1/ (2) The bill requires votes to be counted within 24 hours of the closing of polls. That means that jurisdictions have ~36 hours to count mail-in ballots. Why?

(3) So do you want to do away entirely with ballots that are postmarked by election day but arrive late? Why? 2/
Sep 23, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Today, John Coltrane, probably the most influential tenor sax player in history, would have been 94.

I first heard about Coltrane in high school when I went to a summer music camp at @BYU. Ray Smith mentioned Bird (who I'd probably heard of) and Trane. npr.org/2020/09/23/915… 1/ I remember walking to the lockers to put my horn away repeating "Coltrane, Coltrane, Coltrane" so that I wouldn't forget his name. During high school I bought Giant Steps, Blue Train, and a 3-CD Impulse! best-of Coltrane release.

I also had a bunch of Miles with Trane on tenor 2