It is a great pleasure and honor to have been invited to be the guest blogger on A Taxing Matter while Linda Beale is away. My primary goal as the stand-in is to do as little damage as possible. Professor Beale has built a good brand name here, and I should try not to devalue it.
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One of the things that I like most about this blog is that Prof. Beale does not indulge the temptation to opine about any random subject that comes to mind on a given day. Her expertise is in tax policy, and that is what she writes about. I’m sure that she has insightful things to say about, say, architecture or quantum mechanics or ballroom dancing, but she does not presume to fill the blogosphere with her thoughts on such subjects.
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This reminds me of a column that Gary Becker, the economist at the University of Chicago, wrote in Business Week (where he was a monthly contributor) in late 1992. He had just been named the 1992 winner of The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, which is the official name of the award that most people incorrectly refer to as the Nobel Prize in Economics. Protesting that he should not be treated as an “expert on everything” simply by virtue of winning an award—an award which is, I would emphasize, a recognition of excellence in some usually very technical aspect of economics—and noting with disapproval that some previous prize winners used their prize as “a pulpit from which they launched sermons against political candidates they opposed,” Becker told his readers that he would try not to fall into that trap. He would continue to write about what he knows and would resist the temptation to opine broadly. Good advice.
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Of course, Becker’s subsequent writings in Business Week and more recently on his blog with Richard Posner at least raise the suspicion that he has forgotten his own advice. To be fair, though, since Becker’s claim to fame is his insistence that the basic tools of economics can and should be used to analyze marriage, crime, addiction, etc., maybe there really is no conflict between Becker’s claim that he will not speak outside of his area of expertise and his seeming willingness to speak about any subject. Perhaps he really is an expert on everything. (To be truly fair, at least Becker's digressions are generally into areas at least somewhat connected to economic policy, such as lobbying reform. Still, it is difficult to see why Becker's views on lobbying reform deserve any more consideration than anyone else's.)
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The point of this digression is that having a megaphone is a seductive thing. Why not spout off on anything that comes to mind? Obviously, anyone can blog, and millions of us do; and the typical blogger’s megaphone thus pales by comparison to the megaphone of a Bank of Sweden prize-winner. In either case, though, the speaker owes the listeners at least a statement of what will be blaring through the megaphone. For what it’s worth, I’ll try to do as Becker said, not as he arguably does. Which means that, because of the nature of this blog and the nature of my expertise, I’ll do what Beale does: Write about tax policy issues. I hope that I’ll do so as trenchantly as she does.
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With that in mind, my first substantive post (which will appear later today or on Tuesday) will start with a very personal revelation about my taxes. I think TV executives would refer to that as a “teaser” …
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Neil H. Buchanan, Guest Blogger
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