concurring:
I concur in the judgment of the panel and in the panel’s opinion. I write separately to express my unease with what we have been asked to do here. The basic problem with this case is that the underlying transactions have absolutely no economic substance. The Internal Revenue Service seeks a rule of law from a circuit court to dispose of this case, and others, without being put to the expense and delay of litigating the fact-bound question whether these transactions should be recharac-terized for tax purposes under the no-economic-substance and step-transactions doctrines. The result is a rule of law *463addressing what is here a pretense, an unsettling undertaking.