People exit the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, June 27, 2023.

Minh Connors | The Washington Post | Getty Images

The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments Tuesday on a case that could affect broad swaths of the U.S. tax code and federal revenue.

The closely watched case, Moore v. United States, involves a Washington couple, Charles and Kathleen Moore. They own a controlling interest in a profitable foreign company affected by a tax enacted via former President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax overhaul.

The Moores are fighting a levy on company earnings that weren’t distributed to them — which challenges the definition of income — and could have sweeping effects on the U.S. tax code, according to experts.

“This could have the biggest fiscal policy effects of any court decision in the modern era,” said Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, who co-authored a report on the case.

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The case challenges a levy, known as “deemed repatriation,” enacted via the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Designed as a transition tax, the legislation required a one-time levy on earnings and profits accumulated in foreign entities after 1986.

While the 16th Amendment outlines the legal definition of income, the Moore case questions whether individuals must “realize” or receive profits before incurring taxes. It’s an issue that has been raised during past federal “billionaire tax” debates and could affect future proposals, including wealth taxes.

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who helped draft the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, said at a Brookings Institution event in September that the goal was to “finance a conversion from one system to another, and it wasn’t to justify a wealth tax.”

Ryan, who doesn’t support a wealth tax, said using the Moores’ argument to block one would require getting rid of “a third of the tax code.”

Pass-through businesses could be affected

Depending on how the court decides this case, there could be either small ripples or a major effect on the tax code, according to Daniel Bunn, president and CEO of the Tax Foundation, who has written about the topic.

If the court decides the Moores incurred a tax on unrealized income and says the levy is unconstitutional, it could affect the future taxation of so-called pass-through entities, such as partnerships, limited liability corporations and S corporations, he said.

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“You’ve got to pay attention to the way the rules are going to impact your business, especially if you’re doing things in a cross-border context,” Bunn said.

There’s also the potential for a “substantial impact” on federal revenue, which could influence future tax policy, Bunn said. If deemed repatriation were fully struck down for corporate and noncorporate taxpayers, the Tax Foundation estimates federal revenue would be reduced by $346 billion over the next decade.

However, with a decision not expected until 2024, it’s difficult to predict how the Supreme Court may rule on this case. “There’s a lot of uncertainty about the scope of this thing,” Gardner added.

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FLORENCE, S.C. (AP) — Long before Iowa star Caitlin Clark hit her first long-range three or signed her first autograph, Pearl Moore set a scoring standard for women’s basketball that has stood for 45 years.

The soft-spoken woman from South Carolina led her team at Francis Marion to the postseason four years in a row, averaging more than 30 points every season. The 5-foot-7 guard once scored 60 points in a game.

She did it all under the radar in many ways, playing at a tiny school from 1975-79 when the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) oversaw the sport. Her career points total — a staggering 4,061 — still stands as the overall record in women’s hoops and is unlikely to fall this season even if Clark and the Hawkeyes make another deep NCAA Tournament run.

The 66-year-old Moore is retired now, living in her hometown of Florence about a 90-minute drive from Columbia and the home of the top-ranked South Carolina program many believe will win the national championship this season. Iowa, which lost in the title game last season, is also among the favorites.

AP AUDIO: The women’s scoring record belongs to Pearl Moore. Caitlin Clark is unlikely to reach it this year.

AP Washington correspondent Sagar Meghani reports Iowa’s Caitlin Clark is close to becoming the NCAA’s all-time women’s basketball scoring leader -- but she’s far off the all-time women’s mark.

Moore will be watching. She has enjoyed following Clark’s run at the NCAA scoring record, amazed at her skill along with her composure in handling the demands of packed arenas and constant attention.

“She can lead her team, she can pass and she can score,” Moore said. “Those are three key components to being a great player.”

Moore’s journey to becoming the greatest scorer in the women’s game began in an era when women were not generally encouraged to play sports. But as part of a family of 11 children, there was always a game to join and she said she took to basketball because “there was something about that ball going through the hoop.”

And she could do that in bunches.

“I wanted to win and to do that, you had to score points, so I scored points,” Moore said during an interview courtside at the Pearl Moore Center in Florence.

Moore remembers getting just a couple of inquiries about playing college ball from schools in the AIAW, which at one point had more than 1,000 member schools.

She began her college career at Anderson Junior College, where she scored 177 points in eight games. Always a homebody, Moore came back to the Florence area to play for Francis Marion, now part of NCAA Division II. In those days, women’s basketball was largely the purview of the AIAW, which lasted until 1982, but Francis Marion was among the smaller schools by any measure.

Moore played for Sylvia Hatchell, who went on to win an NCAA championship with North Carolina. Hatchell wold marvel at Moore’s ability to get off shots. Hatchell said Moore would often wait for a defender to get close enough for contact before shooting and come away with the extra foul shots.

“She always said that,” Moore acknowledged. “But I just knew we had to get as many points as we could.”

Moore played professionally after college for the New York and St. Louis franchises of the old Women’s Professional Basketball League. She won a league title with the New York Stars her rookie season, playing sparsely attended games at the Felt Forum at Madison Square Garden.

Moore played a season overseas in Venezuela after the WPBL folded and won that league’s championship as well. She did not understand much of the language, except about her main objective.

“They kept yelling, ‘Lonza,’” Moore recalled, which means “ready for battle” and she interpreted as keep shooting.

After that season in 1982, Moore wanted to return to her hometown where she would hold youth basketball camps and work for the Postal Service. She was enshrined in the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2011 and the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame 10 years later, with Hatchell as her presenter.

While Moore holds the overall record, former Kansas star Lynette Woodard holds the women’s major college basketball record with 3,649 points from 1978-81. Kelsey Plum set the women’s NCAA record after her four-year career at Washington (2013-17) and that total is the one Clark is set to pass this week to draw closer to Woodard and Moore.

South Carolina assistant coach Jolette Law grew up in Florence and played at the same high school as Moore, Wilson High. Law remembers how Moore played hard and was practically unguardable against women and men alike.

Moore coached Law at youth clinics and at high school practices, helping her get recruited to Iowa under C. Vivian Stringer. Law considers Moore a mentor and inspiration.

“To have someone like that help me learn the game was very special,” said Law, who was honored by her hometown when the court at the Pearl Moore Center was named for her.

Moore brushed off the notion of where she might rank into today’s game. Many of her shots, Francis Marion’s longtime media relations and marketing director affirmed, came beyond the 3-point line distance of 22 feet, 1 3/4 inches.

“I’m not the only one that affects,” she said. “Players like Lynette Woodard and Carol Blazejowski would’ve had bigger totals as well because of how we played.”

Blazejowski played at Montclair State in the mid-70s and finished with 3,199 points.

Moore said she is grateful for her accomplishments, content with her place in the game and she is happy for Clark.

“Just tell those (TV) analysts to make sure they call it right” as the NCAA scoring record, she quipped.

___

AP women’s college basketball: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-womens-college-basketball-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/womens-college-basketball

Rohit Verma has been selected as dean of the Darla Moore School of Business, effective August 1.

Verma joins the Moore School from VinUniversity in Hanoi, Vietnam, where he serves as the founding provost of Vietnam’s first private, not-for-profit university based on international standards. Verma is also a professor of operations, technology and information management at Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business. Prior to his role at VinUniversity, which was established in strategic collaboration with Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania, Verma served as dean of external affairs at Cornell’s SC Johnson College of Business.

Verma’s leadership experience at Cornell also includes serving as the executive director for the Center for Hospitality Research and as the founding executive director for the Institute for Healthy Futures. While on leave from Cornell since 2019, Verma has served in several concurrent leadership positions at VinUniversity, where he won the Excellent Leader Award in 2021.

“Dr. Verma is an award-winning teacher, a successful researcher, and an innovative leader, and we are pleased to welcome him to the Carolina family,” USC President Michael Amiridis said. “His excellent academic record and his international perspective will be great complements to the leading-edge work of the Darla Moore School of Business.”

As a founding member of an international university, Verma was in a unique position to shape the school’s standard of excellence through innovative and decisive leadership. During his time with VinUniversity, Verma has been able to recruit highly accomplished and diverse academic leaders and faculty from over 10 countries, establish a fully integrated campus life system, and develop curriculum programs for all degree programs based on active learning and experiential learning. He is eager to apply the lessons he has learned to the Darla Moore School of Business.

“Dr. Verma is a world-class leader whose experience and success at both Cornell University and VinUniversity have prepared him to add tremendous value to the Moore School,” said Donna Arnett, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. “I look forward to working with Dr. Verma to uphold and enhance the Moore School’s outstanding international reputation, and to continue advancing the incredible contributions the school is making to the world of business.”

The Darla Moore School of Business is globally recognized for its international business program and boasts outstanding job placement rates, thanks to the robust education students receive in applied business analytics, experiential learning, and interpersonal and communications skills.

The school is also home to 12 research centers, which bolster the university’s research excellence through faculty members’ groundbreaking work and industry expertise. Verma looks forward to strengthening the school’s international reputation through expanded opportunities for impactful research, active and experiential learning, and meaningful engagement with industry thought leaders, corporations, and community members.

“From the very early stage in my academic career, I have taken a multi-disciplinary perspective and collaborated actively with colleagues from other fields,” said Verma. “I hope to collaborate with all colleagues at the Moore School in ensuring that the school’s core values are reflected and prioritized in all aspects of our work.”

Darla Moore School of Business

The Darla Moore School of Business offers a remarkable array of program choices for careers in business. You will have the opportunity to receive an education that prepares you to be data proficient, analytically capable, and functionally grounded, ready for today and tomorrow’s business challenges.

If you wanted evidence that a giant comet wiped out the wooly mammoth, you might look for a giant crater.

But so far, you’d be out of luck.

“Some of our critics have said, ‘Where’s the crater?’” says Christopher Moore, an archaeologist at the University of South Carolina. “As of now, we don't have a crater or craters.”

But Moore says that by looking below the surface, you can find strong evidence for the Younger-Dryas impact hypothesis, which states that large comet fragments hit Earth or exploded in the atmosphere shortly after the last ice age, setting off cataclysmic changes in the environment, crater or not.

Moore’s research involves digging down to layers of soil that would have been exposed in the Younger Dryas period, around 12,800 years ago when the climate suddenly cooled in the northern hemisphere. He analyzes minerals and artifacts found there in search for “proxies” of a comet strike—findings that are not direct evidence, but which do tell a story.

In Greenland’s ice cores, Moore and others have found elevated levels of chemicals, called combustion aerosols, indicating a large, prehistoric fire raged at the beginning of the Younger Dryas climate event.

In sites as diverse as Syria and South Carolina, he has found platinum, which is rare in Earth’s soil but abundant in comets.

He also has found microscopic, magnetic balls of iron called “microspherules,” which hint that something flung melted iron across the globe.

Moore’s latest discovery involves “shock-fractured quartz” found at three sites in South Carolina, Maryland and New Jersey. These small mineral grains have microscopic cracks where quartz morphed into melted silica. Finding them so far apart adds to the story: Quartz doesn’t undergo metamorphosis and fly 500 miles without a significant impact.

“It’s like putting 75 elephants on a quarter,” Moore says. “It's a tremendous amount of pressure that creates what we're seeing.”

The Science Open journal Airbursts and Cratering Impactspublished Moore’s study of shock-fractured quartz this May.

One of Moore’s dig sites for this study was Flamingo Bay, a shallow wetland on the Department of Energy’s Savannah River nuclear site. Other sites included Parsons Island, Maryland, which lies in the Chesapeake Bay, and Newtonville, New Jersey, about 25 miles inland from Atlantic City.

In all three sites, Moore found shock-fractured quartz, platinum, and microspherules more abundantly at depths that were exposed in the Younger Dryas time period compared to surrounding layers of soil.

This was the first time that shock-fractured quartz has been found at the Younger Dryas depth at multiple sites. But it’s also one of the first studies to look for shock-fractured quartz, Moore says, so additional samples may surface in more widespread studies.

Moore's findings suggest that a comet struck the earth, scattered minerals far and wide, and caused a massive fire that could have consumed the plants eaten by giant mammals while the smoke from such a fire could have set off a period of global cooling.

“I suspect that it played a big role in leading to the extinction of the megafauna,” Moore says.

But that story raises a couple of questions.

First is the question asked by so many Younger Dryas critics: Where’s the crater?

Moore isn’t writing off the crater yet, but he also says the comet might not have left one. Computer simulations have shown that a comet could explode before hitting the ground and generate a shock wave that could have far-reaching impacts without leaving one identifiable crater, he says.

“They explode in the air before they hit the ground, but if they're low enough, the shockwave and heat can hit the ground and melt sediment, produce microspherules, and shock the quartz,” Moore says, describing the hypothesis.

Then there’s a more existential one: If a large comet hit our planet once, could it happen again?

That’s why scientists scan the sky for objects on a collision course with Earth. But the hunt for Armageddon-style comets is not foolproof. Since 2001, military satellites have detected more than 20 large meteors exploding in the atmosphere with enough energy to be mistaken for a nuclear explosion.

These previously undetected meteors blew up in the upper atmosphere—too far from the ground to cause damage, but too close to ignore.

“We’re being hit by these things more than most people think,” Moore says. “It’s just a matter of time before we get something like the Younger Dryas impact.”

Moore isn’t nervous, though. Statistically speaking, most future meteor impacts would have short-lived, local effects rather than global, long-term impacts, he says. But it’s worth it to continue looking.

“We need to think much more about how these impacts may have affected human societies in the past,” he says.