There’s a Catch
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The Queens college student who caught the ball that Barry Bonds belted into the history books for his record-breaking 756th home run says the reason he is putting it up for auction is taxes. The Daily News reports that the lucky fan, Mark Murphy, “had hoped to keep the ball that hammered Hank Aaron’s record but changed his mind when he realized he would be socked with a massive tax bill. ‘It would probably be between $100,000 and $200,000,’ he said.” The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Mr. Murphy said “that he wished he could hang on to the record-breaking pearl and eventually display it to his grandchildren.” The Chronicle quoted Mr. Murphy as saying that “his hand had been forced by a dreaded foe: the tax man. He feared he would be taxed on the value of the ball, even if he declined to cash in.”
No one is feeling too sorry for Mr. Murphy, who will still come out ahead financially once the ball is sold. Some tax experts say it actually isn’t clear that Mr. Murphy’s tax bill would be due immediately, and that there might be a way to defer taxes on the ball’s value until it is sold. But forcing a sale of an asset for tax reasons when a person would prefer to keep the asset in the family is the sort of behavior that happens all too often in our system of taxation. It happens with the death tax — children would prefer to keep a business or a property in the family, but are forced to sell the asset to pay the estate taxes that are due.
This is something that simply cannot be said too often in our political debates. Taxes affect behavior. They affect behavior. In Mr. Murphy’s case, taxes are affecting his behavior in a way that the authors of the tax code — the politicians in Washington, Albany, and City Hall – would do well to keep in mind. The tax collectors say they just want revenue to fund the necessities of government, but what they wind up doing all too often is seizing cherished possessions out of the hands of Americans who, like Mr. Murphy, would much prefer to pass them along to their grandchildren. One behavior taxes affect is voting. There may be this season but one home run ball of the value of the one Mr. Murphy caught, but there are millions of Mr. Murphys who resent the way the tax code has affected them.
