In clear language, Posin and Tobin's Principles of Federal Income Taxation explores exotic Wall Street techniques employed to avoid capital gains. It includes analysis of cases and concepts of the leading casebooks, explanations with amplified diagrams and flow charts, and extensive treatment of the time value of money issues. This book explains equity swaps, shorting against the box, swap funds, and DECS. It presents, among other high-profile situations, a case study of how former Treasury Secretary William Simon and his partners made $700 million in profits on the sale of the Avis car rental agency less than two years after they bought it and paid no taxes.

Taxation is a discipline that does not receive sufficient academic attention. It is typically viewed as a subset of law, accounting, public policy, economics, or finance. In this respect, most academic efforts in the field of taxation are shadowed by a mother discipline. There is currently an unprecedented need to approach tax pedagogy in a way that is independent of another discipline. This book caters to that real and unmet need in tax pedagogy. One of the book’s advantages is that it is not tied to a specific tax year and does not coddle the reader with volumes of time-sensitive information. In this book the tax year is never the focus, as the center stage is reserved for teaching the principles and skills necessary to independently find answers. The reader will learn to appreciate the complexity of the American tax system and will be endowed with the contextual understanding necessary to formulate educated opinions about how taxes work and, most importantly, why. Contrary to common belief, taxation in the United States has remained fairly stable for the last 100 years. This book uses the federal individual income tax as a vehicle to unveil the mechanics that make up the American tax system. This book is essential reading for students taking a first course in taxation, at the undergraduate or graduate level, as part of programs in accounting, law, public administration, or business at large.

The new edition of this established revenue textbook makes tax law understandable by demystifying the jargon, and will be welcomed by undergraduates, teachers of tax law and practitioners needing a simple guide to the subject. It concentrates on explaining the various principles underlying the major taxes, as well as offering an insight into how tax law has developed and is applied. It covers the basic principles of income tax, corporation tax, capital gains tax, inheritance tax and VAT and analyses how each tax operates. Davies: Principles of Tax Law includes online supplements, enabling the authors to update the book with the latest legislative and case law developments. (www sweetandmaxwell.co.uk/academic) Major developments in the fifth edition include: The significant developments in EU tax law The impact on tax law of the Convention on Human Rights The major changes arising from the tax law rewrite programme - employment income (already enacted) and trading income and income from land, and savings income (in progress) The expected major rewrite of the pensions provisions Tax credits A new chapter on taxation of intellectual property; The significant developments in VAT in res