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Chapter 2
Property Acquisition and Cost Recovery
SOLUTIONS MANUAL
Discussion Questions
1. [LO 1] Explain the reasoning why the tax laws require the cost of certain assets to be
capitalized and recovered over time rather than immediately expensed.
Assets with an expected life of more than one year must be capitalized and
recovered through depreciation, amortization, or depletion deductions—depending
on the type of underlying asset. The policy attempts to match the revenues and
expenses for these assets because the assets have a useful life of more than one year.
2. [LO 1] Explain the differences and similarities between personal property, real
property, intangible property, and natural resources. Also, provide an example of
each type of asset.
Personal property, real property, and natural resources are all tangible property
than can be seen and touched. Natural resources are assets that occur naturally
(e.g. timber or coal). Real property is land and all property that is attached to land
(e.g. buildings). Personal property is all tangible property that is not a natural
resource or real property. Intangibles are all intellectual property rights (e.g.
patents and copyrights) and any other value not assigned as a tangible asset during
a purchase (e.g. goodwill). Each of these has an expected useful life of more than
one year.
Copyright © 2017 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill
Education.
There are three types of cost recovery: depreciation, amortization, and depletion.
Each is similar in that they recover the cost basis of long-lived assets. Depreciation
for real property, amortization, and cost depletion are on a straight-line basis.
(Taxpayers may elect straight-line on tangible personal property as well.) The
primary difference is that they are used for property with unique characteristics.
Depreciation of tangible personal property is done on an accelerated (most often
double-declining balance) method. Percentage depletion assigns a statutory rate
that may recover more than the original cost of the asset.
4. [LO 1] Is an asset’s initial or cost basis simply its purchase price? Explain.
The initial basis of any purchased business asset is historical cost. This is generally
the purchase price, plus any other expenses (e.g. sales tax and installation costs)
incurred to get the asset in working condition. This does not include costs, which
constitute a betterment, restoration, or adaptation to a new or different use for an
asset such as a building addition.
Copyright © 2017 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill
Education.
Solutions Manual – McGraw-Hill’s Taxation, by Spilker et al.
5. [LO 1] Compare and contrast the basis of property acquired via purchase, conversion
from personal use to business or rental use, a nontaxable exchange, gift, and
inheritance.
The basis of purchased assets is historical cost. The basis rules for other
acquisitions depend on whether the transaction was taxable or not. For taxable
transactions there is usually a step-up in basis to fair market value. For non-taxable
transactions, there is usually a carryover basis. Conversion of assets from personal
use gets the lesser of the two values. The specific rules are as follows:
6. [LO 1] Explain why the expenses incurred to get an asset in place and operable
should be included in the asset’s basis.
Additional expenses, including sales tax, shipping, installation costs, and the like
are capitalized into an asset’s basis because all costs required to place an asset into
service are required to be included into its basis. That is, without these costs, the
taxpayer would not be able to place in service or use the asset in a business.
7. [LO 1] Graber Corporation runs a long-haul trucking business. Graber incurs the
following expenses: replacement tires, oil changes, and a transmission overhaul.
Which of these expenditures may be deducted currently and which must be
capitalized? Explain.
Copyright © 2017 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill
Education.
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CHAPTER II.
THE INVENTION OF PRINTING AND THE WORK OF THE
FIRST PRINTERS OF HOLLAND AND GERMANY.
1440-1528.
“
FOUR men, Gutenberg, Columbus, Luther, and Copernicus,
stand at the dividing line of the Middle Ages, and serve as boundary
stones marking the entrance of mankind into a higher and finer
epoch of its development.”[421]
It would be difficult to say which one of the four has made the
largest contribution to this development or has done the most to lift
up the spirit of mankind and to open for men the doors to the new
realms that were in readiness. The Genoese seaman and discoverer
opens new realms to our knowledge and imagination, leads Europe
from the narrow restrictions of the Middle Ages out into the vast
space of Western oceans, and in adding to the material realms
controlled by civilisation, widens still more largely the range of its
thought and fancy. The Reformer of Wittenberg, in breaking the
bonds which had chained the spirits of his fellow-men and in
securing for them again their rights as individual Christians,
conquers for them a spiritual realm and brings them into renewed
relations with their Creator. The great astronomer shatters, through
his discoveries, the fixed and petty conceptions of the universe
which had ruled the minds of mankind, and in bringing to them fresh
light on the nature and extent of created things, widens at the same
time their whole understanding of themselves and of duty. The
citizen of Mayence may claim to have unchained intelligence and
given to it wings. He utilised lead no longer as a death-bringing ball,
but in the form of life-quickening letters which were to bring before
thousands of minds the teachings of the world’s thinkers. Each one
of the four had his part in bringing to the world light, knowledge, and
development.
At the time when the art of printing finally took shape in the mind of
Gutenberg, the direction of literary and intellectual interests of
Germany rested, as we have seen, largely with Italy. The fact,
however, that the new art had its birthplace, not in Florence, which
was at that time the centre of the literary activities of Europe, but in
Mayence, heretofore a town which had hardly been connected at all
with literature, and the further fact that the printing-presses were
carrying on their work in Germany for nearly fifteen years before two
printers, themselves Germans, set up the first press in Italy,
exercised, of necessity, an important influence in inciting literary
activities throughout Germany and in the relations borne by
Germany to the scholarship of the world.
The details of the life and early work of Gutenberg are at best but
fragmentary, and have been a subject of much discussion. It is not
necessary, for the purpose of this treatise, to give detailed
consideration to the long series of controversies as to the respective
claims of Gutenberg of Mayence, of Koster of Haarlem, or of other
competitors, as to the measure of credit to be assigned to each in
the original discovery or of the practical development of the the
printing-press. It seems in any case evident that whatever minds
elsewhere were at that time puzzling over the same problem, it was
the good fortune of Gutenberg to make the first practical application
of the printing-press to the production of impressions from movable
type, while it was certainly from Mayence that the art spread
throughout the cities, first of Germany, and later of Italy and France.
It is to be borne in mind (and I speak here for the non-technical
reader) that, as indicated in the above reference, the distinction and
important part of the invention of Gutenberg was, not the production
of a press for the multiplication of impressions, but the use of
movable type and the preparation of the form from which the
impressions were struck off. The art of printing from blocks, since
classified as xylographic printing, had been practised in certain
quarters of Europe for fifty years or more before the time of
Gutenberg, and if Europe had had communication with China,
xylography might have been introduced four or five centuries earlier.
With the block-books, the essential thing was the illustrations, and
what text or letterpress accompanied these was usually limited to a
few explanatory or descriptive words engraved on the block, above,
beneath or around the picture. Occasionally, however, as in the Ars
Moriendi, there were entire pages of text engraved, like the designs,
on the solid block. The earlier engraving was done on hard wood,
but, later, copper was also employed. It is probable that the block-
books originated in the Netherlands, and it is certain that in such
towns as Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam, the art was developed
more rapidly than elsewhere, so that during the first half of the
fifteenth century, the production of wood engravings and of books
made up of engravings (printed only on one side, and accompanied
by a few words of text), began to form an important article of trade.
The subjects of these designs were for the most part Biblical, or at
least religious. One of the earlier of the block-book publications and
probably the most characteristic specimen of the class, is the volume
known as the Biblia Pauperum. This was a close imitation of a
manuscript book that had for five or six centuries been popular as a
work of religious instruction. It had been composed about 850, by S.
Ausgarius, a monk of Corbie, who afterwards became Bishop of
Hamburg. The scriptorium established by him at Corbie was said to
have been the means of preserving from destruction a number of
classics, including the Annals of Tacitus.[422] The use, five centuries
later, as one of the first productions of the printing-press, of the
monk’s own composition, may be considered as a fitting
acknowledgement of the service thus rendered by him to the world’s
literature. Examples of manuscript copies of the Biblia Pauperum are
in existence in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, in Munich, in the
British Museum, and elsewhere, and there is no difficulty in
comparing these with the printed copies produced in the
Netherlands, which are also represented in these collections.
It is probable that Laurence Koster of Haarlem, whose name is,
later, associated with printing from movable type, was himself an
engraver of block-books. Humphreys is, in fact, inclined to believe
that the first block-book edition of the Biblia Pauperum was actually
Koster’s work, basing this opinion on the similarity of the
compositions and of their arrangement to those of the Speculum
Humanæ Salvationis, which was the first work printed from movable
type, and the production of which is now generally credited to
Koster.[423] The Biblia Pauperum was printed from blocks in
Germany as late as 1475, but before that date an edition had been
printed from movable type by Pfister in Bamberg.
As has been pointed out by many of the writers on the subject, the
so-called invention of printing was not so much the result of an
individual inspiration, as the almost inevitable consequence of a long
series of experiments and of partial processes which had been
conducted in various places where the community was interesting
itself in the multiplication of literature.
If, as is probably the case, the first book printed from movable type
is to be credited to Koster, it remains none the less the case that
Gutenberg’s process must have been worked out for itself, and that
the German possessed, what the Hollander appears to have lacked,
not merely the persistence and the practical understanding required
to produce a single book, but the power to overcome obstacles and
to instruct others, and was thus able to establish the new art on a
lasting foundation.
The claims of the Hollanders under which Koster is to be regarded
as the first printer, or at least (bearing in mind the Chinese
precedents in the tenth century) the first European printer, from
movable type, claims which Humphreys accepts as well founded, are
in substance as follows: Laurence Koster was born, somewhere in
Holland, about 1370, and died in Haarlem about 1440. He is
believed to have made his first experiments with movable wooden
types about 1426, and to have worked with metal types about ten
years later. The principal of the earlier authorities concerning
Koster’s career is a certain Hadrian Junius, who completed, in 1569,
a history of Holland, which was published in 1588. He speaks of
Koster as being a man of an honourable family, in which the office of
Sacristan (custos, Coster or Koster) was hereditary, and he
describes in detail the development of the invention of type, from the
cutting of pieces of beech-bark into the form of letters, to the final
production of the metal fonts. Junius goes on to relate the method
under which Koster’s first book (from type), Speculum Humanæ
Salvationis, was printed, in 1430. This book, the origin of which is not
known, had for many years been popular among the Benedictines,
and few of their monasteries were without a copy. As a result of this
popularity, many examples of the manuscript copies have been
preserved, some of which are in the Arundel collection in the British
Museum. Zani says that the Speculum was compiled for the
assistance of poor preachers, and in support of this view he quotes
certain lines, which may serve also as an example of Latinity and of
the general style: