We’ve launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Brightlooks at how the Supreme Court’s decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities. Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com. This Day in Legal History: The Treasury Department Is Created On September 2, 1789, Congress passed the act establishing the Department of the Treasury—the third executive department created under the new Constitution, after Foreign Affairs and War, both of which we’ve marked on this show. A week or so later, President Washington would name Alexander Hamilton its first Secretary, and with that appointment, one of the most consequential careers in American governance began. The Treasury Department was, in a real sense, where the abstract new government became a functioning state. Hamilton inherited a country drowning in Revolutionary War debt, with no reliable revenue, no national bank, and shaky credit at home and abroad. Over the next few years, from that department, he engineered the financial architecture of the United States: the federal assumption of state debts, a system of customs duties and excise taxes to actually bring in revenue, the First Bank of the United States, and the establishment of public credit as a national asset. His conviction—captured in today’s opening quote—was that a manageable national debt, properly serviced, would knit the country’s creditors to its success and give the young republic financial standing in the world. The significance of September 2, 1789 is that the Treasury became, and remains, one of the most powerful institutions in American life. It runs the IRS, manages the public debt, enforces sanctions, and shapes economic policy in ways that touch every person in the country. The debates Hamilton started—about debt, about taxation, about how much the federal government should do with its fiscal power—are debates we are still having, quite literally, in every episode where we cover a tax question. And it’s a fitting anniversary for today, because our final segment is a tax story—a reminder that the unglamorous machinery of how governments raise revenue, which Hamilton built, is where an enormous amount of real policy actually happens. A Utah judge has ruled that there is enough evidence to send Tyler Robinson to trial for the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk—and, critically, that prosecutors may seek the death penalty. We covered the prosecution’s theory of this case back in July; now it has cleared its first major legal hurdle. At a preliminary hearing, Judge Tony Graf found the state had met the probable-cause standard on all seven counts, including aggravated murder, concluding that the evidence was “sufficient at this stage to support a reasonable belief that the defendant is the individual who shot and killed Charlie Kirk.” A word on that standard, because it matters: a preliminary hearing is a low bar. The state doesn’t have to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt—that’s for the trial. It only has to show probable cause, a reasonable belief that a crime occurred and this defendant committed it. So this ruling isn’t a verdict; it’s a green light to proceed. The most consequential fight at the hearing was over whether this qualifies as aggravated murder, the charge that makes the death penalty available. Under Utah law, that generally requires an aggravating circumstance—and here prosecutors argued that Robinson, by allegedly firing a rifle from a rooftop toward Kirk near a crowd at Utah Valley University, knowingly created a great risk of death to people other than his target. The prosecutor called it “common sense” that shooting into a crowd endangers others; the defense contested it. The judge sided with the state, keeping capital punishment in play. The significance is that this now becomes a death-penalty trial in a case already saturated with political meaning, and everything—the evidence, the alleged motive, the aggravating circumstances—will now be tested under the far more demanding standard of a jury trial. Utah judge rules accused killer of Charlie Kirk will stand trial, face death penalty | ReutersNPR · CNN Now for something lighter, though still a real lesson in criminal procedure: Tiger Woods has reached a plea deal in his Florida impaired-driving case, and will lose his driver’s license for five years. Woods was arrested in March after a rollover crash on Jupiter Island; no one was hurt. Under the plea agreement, prosecutors amended the charges—the first count down to reckless driving as a second offense, and the second to a careless-driving citation—and Woods agreed to the five-year license suspension plus a $1,500 fine, avoiding jail time. This is a textbook illustration of how plea bargaining actually works: the vast majority of criminal cases never go to trial, and instead resolve through negotiated pleas in which the defendant accepts responsibility for a reduced charge in exchange for a lighter, more certain outcome, and the state secures a conviction without the cost and risk of trial. Two details are worth flagging. First, “second offense”—Woods had a prior reckless-driving plea back in 2017, and repeat offenses generally carry stiffer consequences, which is part of why the license suspension is so long. Second, the judge was pointed about that suspension, saying it’s “for the safety of the public” and that there are “no exceptions”—drive for any reason at all, the judge warned, and Woods goes straight to jail. The significance, beyond the celebrity, is a clean look at how the system handles impaired driving for someone who isn’t a first-timer: not incarceration, but a charge reduction paired with a long, strictly-enforced license suspension aimed squarely at keeping him off the road. It’s the everyday machinery of criminal justice, applied to an extraordinarily famous defendant. Woods gets 5-year license suspension in plea deal | ReutersABC News · CNN And finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I take on a delightfully wonky problem with a real-world bite: the way Massachusetts taxes interstate trucks. My argument is that the state’s rolling-stock tax is backward—it functions, weirdly, as a reverse carbon tax and a hidden tax on consumers—and that the fix isn’t simply to exempt trucks, but to redesign the tax around where the trucks are actually used. Here’s the problem. Massachusetts applies its sales and use tax to the full purchase price of an interstate truck, even if only a sliver of that truck’s miles are logged in Massachusetts. Under state guidelines, a truck basically escapes the tax only if it spends six or fewer days in the state over a year—spend a week, and you can owe tax on the vehicle’s entire price. Now layer on a perverse consequence: newer, cleaner trucks cost more money, so a tax based on purchase price falls hardest on the newest, most efficient, lowest-emission equipment. That gives carriers an obvious incentive to keep their clean new trucks out of Massachusetts and send in their older, dirtier ones. A state that says it cares about emissions has built a tax that literally rewards operating older, more polluting trucks within its borders. And because this is a tax on a business input, it doesn’t stay with the trucking companies—it gets baked into freight costs and shows up in the price of groceries, medicine, and building materials, a phenomenon economists call tax pyramiding and the rest of us call higher prices. So what should Massachusetts do? There’s a House bill to exempt qualifying interstate rolling stock, and I say that moves in the right direction—but the state shouldn’t stop at a blanket exemption. The cleaner solution is apportionment: tax the Massachusetts share of the truck’s use, based on in-state mileage, the same way states already apportion other business activity. Massachusetts taxes the Massachusetts piece, New York the New York piece, and so on. That six-day threshold is a lousy proxy—the seventh day a truck rolls through the state doesn’t magically make the other 358 days of interstate driving Massachusetts activity. I also argue the state should make sure that upgrading to a cleaner fleet never increases a carrier’s tax bill—give newer, higher-emissions-standard vehicles a credit or adjustment. And because no carrier should face a different tax regime every time it crosses a state line, I think the right long-term answer is a uniform, mileage-based model rule developed through something like the Multistate Tax Commission. The bumper-sticker version of my argument: removing this distortion is environmental policy, even though it looks like a tax break—because sometimes the cheapest, smartest thing a government can do is just stop taxing the very behavior it claims to want. Massachusetts Truck Taxes Need Revamp Beyond Adding an Exemption | Bloomberg Tax This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe
