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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.
185 Episodes
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Send a text Jeff and Scott chat with Mike Kaercher, Deputy Director of the Tax Law Center at NYU Law, about where tax law comes from. We often refer to “tax law,” but in this episode we unpack what that actually means—how the Internal Revenue Code, Treasury Regulations, and court cases, all the rest, all fit together, and who actually writes the words on the pages we consider to be tax law.
Send us a text Jeff and Scott chat with Conor Clarke, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, about the Supreme Court case challenging President Trump’s sweeping tariffs imposed by executive order. The key questions are whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act authorizes the types of tariffs President Trump has put in place, if it does, whether Congress can delegate tariff-setting power that broadly even if they want to. What will the Court decide?
Send us a text Jeff and Scott chat with Joe Thorndike about how the United States moved from relying heavily on tariffs to building the modern income-tax-based system we know today. Joe is a tax historian and journalist, and writes for Tax Notes, where he writes widely on the history and politics of U.S. tax policy. They walk through the political and economic forces that made tariffs both attractive—and eventually untenable—as a main source of revenue. Along the way, they discuss the c...
Send us a text Jeff and Scott talk with Jason DeBacker about his new paper, Learning from 25 Years of Changes in Business Tax Policy (with Aerfate Haimiti). Jason is an associate professor of economics at the University of South Carolina and the director of the Policy Simulation Library, an open-source effort that helps researchers and policymakers analyze policy. They discuss his work at PSL and what the last 25 years of business tax changes have taught us—whether bonus depreciation boosts i...
Send us a text Jeff and Scott chat with David Mitchel, a Senior Fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, about the small business stock exclusion, recent changes to it, and an article that David wrote with Kyle Pomerleau about why we should get rid of it.
Send us a text Luke 2 tells us that Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem "to be taxed", and while there, the baby Jesus was born. But, what do we know about that taxing from history? Did everyone travel? What was the general tax environment in the Roman world at the time? Did they actually remit a tax, or, what was the purpose of this trip? Jeff and Scott chat with Roman historian Anna Dolganov about these questions, and more. Anna's previous appearance on the show: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1...
Send us a text Jeff and Scott talk with Justin Schein. They discuss Justin's newest film, and the issues and questions it brings up. Justin's newest film is Death and Taxes, which "is a feature documentary about wealth, inequality and the American Dream, viewed through the lens of the estate tax and the very personal story of a father and son at odds over what kind of inheritance we want to leave our kids and our country." Learn more about the film here: https://www.deathandtaxesfilm.co...
Send us a text We start by explaining the Tax Chats DC Tour, 2025, an exclusive live event! Then, Jeff and Scott chat with Pete Sepp, President of the National Taxpayers Union. They talk about the work the NTU has done in the past, and what it currently does, including advocate for legislation that is beneficial to taxpayers and engaging in litigation the NTU believes will bring about taxpayer-friendly changes. Pete gives advice to those who want to make the world a friendly place for taxpaye...
Send us a text Jeff and Scott chat with Ajay Mehrotra, law professor at Northwestern, about the economist Edwin Seligman. They discuss Seligman's academic legacy, his views on progressive taxation, his influence on Columbia University, his students, and his views on tax policy.
Send us a text Jeff and Scott chat with Marc Goldwein, who is the Senior Vice President and Senior Policy Director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. They chat about Medicaid, a huge piece in the federal government's budget, and an essential piece of understand what needs our tax system must satisfy. They talk about the program in general, ways in which it was recently reformed under the One Big Beautiful Bill, and what we might do to fix it going forward.
Send us a text Jeff and Scott chat with Anna Dolganov, an academy scientist at the Austrian Archeological Institute, about her work on a recently re-discovered papyrus. The papyrus contained notes from a tax evasion trial in ancient Rome, which Dr. Dolganov translated. We discuss taxes in ancient Rome, Jewish tax revolts, how to evade taxes on the goods Rome taxed (including human slaves), and what we can learn from the papyrus about the trial.
Send us a text Jeff and Scott chat with Henry (Hank) Aaron, a Senor Fellow Emeritus at the Brookings Institution, about Social Security. They discuss how it started, how we fund it, who gets it, how it has been reformed, and how it could be fixed.
Send us a text Jeff and Scott very briefly talk about the bombshell news that podcasters are included on the Treasury's list of jobs eligible for "no tax on tips." https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Tipped-Occupations-Detailed-8-27-2025.pdf Left unexplored is whether any of the other provisions of no tax on tips will preclude Scott and Jeff from receiving tax-free tip income, by means of the credit available to offset declared tip income available in The One Big Beautiful Bill.
Send us a text Jeff and Scott talk with Kyle Pomerleau about how inflation interacts with tax policy and the tax law. Kyle points out that inflation interacts in two major ways: When we tax gains that happen over long periods of time, and we have to think about whether adjusting the gain for inflation would help, and, when the tax system includes explicit dollar values, such as in thresholds, amounts of credits, the income tax brackets themselves.
Send us a text Jeff and Scott chat with Brad Setser, a Senior Fellow on the Council of Foreign Relations, about income shifting among pharma firms, as well as the impact that shifting has on tariffs and international trade.
Send us a text Jeff and Scott take a look at 4 books that Jeff has recently acquired for the Tax Museum library, which numbers at least 677 volumes. Almost all of these books were a an academic bequest from one of Jeff's mentees, Joel Slemrod. Jeff introduces four books, asks a question related to the book, and Scott tries his best at answering. The four books mentioned, and the approximate year of their original publication: Rich and Poor (1898) - Helen Bosanquet Capital (1867) - Karl...
Send us a text In this episode, Jeff and Scott talk with Anders Anderson, a finance professor at the Stockholm School of Economics about, his research evaluating Sweden’s nationwide e-bike subsidy. The program successfully doubled e-bike sales, but had only a modest impact on reducing car use—far less than survey responses suggested. People bought b-bikes, then didn't really use them. When accounting for actual emissions reductions, the cost of carbon abatement was around $800 per ton, ...
Send us a text Jeff and Scott chat for a third time with BlueJ CEO Ben Alarie about new innovations in tax research using artificial intelligence, especially how these tools are being used by tax practitioners, the efficiency gains to using them, and how BlueJ goes about continually improving these tax research tools.
Send us a text In this episode, Scott and Jeff chat with Ruth Braunstein about her recent book "My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America" wherein we discuss complicated issues related to using tax dollars to fund controversial issues like abortion and war. We discuss taxpayer resistance. We chat about the complexities that arise in government use of taxpayer dollars when the underlying population is extremely diverse.
Send us a text Jeff and Scott chat with Kathleen Thomas, a UNC tax law professor, about a recent proposal to allow businesses to have a standard deduction, rather than track expenses. Kathleen explains how this proposal would simplify compliance with and administration of the tax code.
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40:00 sounds like you guys don't actually prepare taxes. It's still schedule A. TCJA also gave us the $600 above the line charitable deduction that has sadly expired.