Tax Simplification: So Necessary and So Elusive

[Excerpt] Cries for tax simplification have long been heard from presidents, legislators, current and former government officials and the public. The judiciary has often expressed its frustrations in comprehending the tax statutes. The Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) itself has had occasion to hesitate and waver in its interpretation and application of the tax statutes, and indeed, several IRS officials have admitted to retaining professional assistance to prepare their personal income tax returns. Though nearly everyone seems to advocate tax simplification, the goal remains elusive. Tax litigation continues to abound, and sometimes, where words alone do not suffice, judges augment textual opinions with graphic illustration in order to effectively elucidate their decisions. The tax statutes and regulation books continue to grow ever more voluminous, and the Internal Revenue Code (“IRC”)10 is replete with sections containing exceptions to the stated rule and to the listed exceptions. Not included in the Code proper, however, are several uncodified revenue statutes of significant importance. A single transaction often gives rise to liability for diverse types of taxes. Several factors conjunctively operate to make and keep our tax system complex. By way of specific examples, this article will discuss some of the dynamics that impede and counteract the tax simplification efforts of the executive and the legislative branches. In doing so, the author does not purport that the cases, statutes, regulations or reports chosen for discussion are the only such examples. Nor does the author intend to woodenly impose any classification system, for the forces at work against tax simplification often appear in many guises and are susceptible to diverse analyses and classifications; moreover, they often interact synergistically with one another. The author seeks here to advance the scholarly and practical understanding as to why taxation continues to resist simplification, by way of identifying and describing the actions of forces that complicate the taxation process

The Mental Database

This article uses database, evolution and physics considerations to suggest how the mind stores and processes its data. Its innovations in its approach lie in:- A) The comparison between the capabilities of the mind to those of a modern relational database while conserving phenomenality. The strong functional similarity of the two systems leads to the conclusion that the mind may be profitably described as being a mental database. The need for material/mental bridging and addressing indexes is discussed. B) The consideration of what neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) between sensorimotor data and instrumented observation one can hope to obtain using current biophysics. It is deduced that what is seen using the various brain scanning methods reflects only that part of current activity transactions (e.g. visualizing) which update and interrogate the mind, but not the contents of the integrated mental database which constitutes the mind itself. This approach yields reasons why there is much neural activity in an area to which a conscious function is ascribed (e.g. the amygdala is associated with fear), yet there is no visible part of its activity which can be clearly identified as phenomenal. The concept is then situated in a Penrosian expanded physical environment, requiring evolutionary continuity, modularity and phenomenality.Several novel Darwinian advantages arising from the approach are described

CRA Grade Inflation

Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA) ratings and performance evaluations are the only bank and thrift exam findings disclosed by financial institution regulators. Inflation of CRA ratings has been alleged by community activists for two decades, but there has been no quantification or empirical investigation of grade inflation. Using a unique grade inflation methodology on actual ratings and evaluation data for 1,407 small banks and thrifts under the revised CRA regulations, this paper concludes that nearly half of all CRA ratings are inflated. Results are presented for the four federal bank and thrift regulators and their 31 regional offices. These findings are consistent with the "Friendly Regulator Hypothesis."

Well-posedness theory for stochastically forced conservation laws on Riemannian manifolds

We investigate a class of scalar conservation laws on manifolds driven by multiplicative Gaussian (Ito) noise. The Cauchy problem defined on a Riemannian manifold is shown to be well-posed. We prove existence of generalized kinetic solutions using the vanishing viscosity method. A rigidity result is derived, which implies that generalized solutions are kinetic solutions and that kinetic solutions are uniquely determined by their initial data ($L^1$ contraction principle). Deprived of noise, the equations we consider coincide with those analyzed by Ben-Artzi and LeFloch (2007), who worked with Kruzkov-DiPerna solutions. In the Euclidian case, the stochastic equations agree with those examined by Debussche and Vovelle (2010).Comment: Submitted for publication on 23.09.1

The cardiac bidomain model and homogenization

We provide a rather simple proof of a homogenization result for the bidomain model of cardiac electrophysiology. Departing from a microscopic cellular model, we apply the theory of two-scale convergence to derive the bidomain model. To allow for some relevant nonlinear membrane models, we make essential use of the boundary unfolding operator. There are several complications preventing the application of standard homogenization results, including the degenerate temporal structure of the bidomain equations and a nonlinear dynamic boundary condition on an oscillating surface.Comment: To appear in Networks and Heterogeneous Media, Special Issue on Mathematical Methods for Systems Biolog

Sea turtle nesting in the Ten Thousand Islands of Florida

Loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) nest in numerous substrate and beach types within the Ten Thousand Islands (TTl) of southwest Florida. Nesting beach selection was analyzed on 12 islands within this archipelago. Numerous physical characteristics were recorded to identify the relatedness of these variables and determine their importance for nesting beach selection in C. caretta. These variables were chosen after evaluating the islands, conducting literature searches and soliciting personal communications. Along transects, data were collected, on the following: height of canopy, beach width, overall slope (beach slope and slope of offshore approach) and sand samples analyzed for pH, percentage of water, percentage of organic content, percentage of carbonate and particle size (8 size classes). Data on ordinal aspect of beaches and beach length were also recorded and included in the analysis. All of the variables were analyzed by tree regression, incorporating the nesting data into the analysis. In the TTl, loggerheads appear to prefer wider beaches (p< 0.001; R2 = 0.56) that inherently have less slope, and secondarily, wider beaches that have low amounts of carbonate (p< O.00 1). In addition, C. caretta favors nest sites within or in close proximity to the supra-littoral vegetation zone of beaches in the TTl (p< 0.001). (86 page document