Tax Chats

Hosted by Dyreng and Hoopes

Business News PoliticsInterviews guests

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Episodes

190

Latest episode

Jun 2026

Language

EN-US

About the show

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.

Listen to episodes

60 recent

June 8, 202628 min

Benjamin Jaros on Colonial Tobacco Tariffs

Send us Fan MailJeff and Scott chat with Ben Jaros, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, about his paper, “Tobacco Tariffs in the Colonial Chesapeake.” Ben explains how tobacco tariffs shaped the finances of colonial Maryland and Virginia, the English Crown, and the broader Atlantic economy from the early 1600s through the Revolutionary War. We discuss who actually bore the burden of these tariffs, why European consumers may have paid most of the cost, and how tobacco revenue helps explain Britain’s fiscal interest in maintaining control over the colonies

May 30, 2026Episode 17538 min

Tax Research with AI: A Chat with Ben Alarie (with offer for tax profs)

Send us Fan MailJeff and Scott chat with the CEO of BlueJ, an AI-powered tax research tool, about updates on BlueJ. Scott announces that BlueJ now offers their product free for tax professors.

May 26, 2026Episode 17431 min

The Tax Policy Center: Chatting with Elena Patel

Send us Fan MailJeff and Scott chat with Elena Patel about the Tax Policy Center, where she is co-director. We talk about the history of the TPC, who works there, and its mission.

April 29, 2026Episode 17334 min

Former IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel on the IRS

Send us Fan MailJeff and Scott interview Danny Werfel, a former IRS commissioner under President Obama and President Biden. They talk about his background, the request from President Obama and Biden that he lead the IRS, challenges and opportunities he encountered at the IRS, and what he would change about the agency if he were IRS King for a day.

February 23, 2026Episode 17238 min

Inconsistency In Crypto Tax Compliance Providers: A Chat with Tyler Menzer

Send us Fan Mail Jeff and Scott talk with Tyler Menzer, an assistant professor of accounting at Texas Christian University, about his recent research on cryptocurrency tax reporting. In the project, Tyler submitted the same set of cryptocurrency transactions to multiple crypto tax software and reporting services, many of which present themselves as tracking or reporting tools rather than tax preparation providers. He found that these services often produced very different calculations of taxable income from identical transactions. The conversation explores why these discrepancies arise and uses them as a starting point for a broader discussion of cryptocurrency taxation, compliance, and reporting challenges.

February 17, 2026Episode 17132 min

What is "The Tax Law": A Chat with Michael Kaercher

Send us Fan MailJeff 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.

February 9, 2026Episode 17040 min

The Supreme Court and Tariffs: A Chat with Conor Clarke

Send us Fan Mail 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?

February 2, 2026Episode 16942 min

How the US Weaned Itself off Tariffs: A chat with Joe Thorndike

Send us Fan Mail 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 creation of the federal income tax, the rise of new revenue needs, and what this history can teach us about today’s debates over trade and taxation.

January 27, 2026Episode 16832 min

What can we learn from 25 Years of Tax History? A Chat with Jason DeBacker

Send us Fan MailJeff 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 investment, how firms respond to shifts in business tax rates, and more.

December 26, 2025Episode 16725 min

A Chat about the Small Business Stock Exclusion with David Mitchell

Send us Fan MailJeff 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.