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Accelerated Depreciation Revisited—A Reply To Professor Blum, Douglas A. Kahn Jun 1980

Accelerated Depreciation Revisited—A Reply To Professor Blum, Douglas A. Kahn

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Professor Blum's comment addresses the proper or neutral tax treatment to be accorded three of the items discussed in my recent article on accelerated depreciation - namely, annuities, prepaid expenses, and exhaustible assets. Blum disputes my analysis in all three cases. While Blum's article is eminently readable, I do not believe that it refutes my earlier work to any extent. In this reply to Professor Blum, I will deal separately with each of the three items he examines. First, however, it is useful to consider the meaning of the term "tax neutrality" and to set forth my views as to …


Accelerated Depreciation—Tax Expenditure Or Proper Allowance For Measuring Net Income?, Douglas A. Kahn Jan 1979

Accelerated Depreciation—Tax Expenditure Or Proper Allowance For Measuring Net Income?, Douglas A. Kahn

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Since the 1950s, it has become fashionable to attack various provisions of the Internal Revenue Code by calling them "subsidies" rather than "proper" means of measuring taxable income. These "subsidies" through Code provisions have come to be referred to as "tax expenditures," a term coined by Professor Stanley Surrey in a speech he made as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Policy on November 15, 1967. In that speech, Professor Surrey stated that our tax system often deliberately departs "from accepted concepts of net income," so that by granting exemptions, deductions, and credits that are not appropriate to an …