Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Senate Finance Committee testimony on May 3

On Tuesday next week, I will be testifying before the U.S. Senate Finance Committee on the subject: "Is the Distribution of Tax Burdens and Tax Benefits Equitable?"

I've submitted my written testimony, with which I am reasonably pleased, and I will post it here once the Committee has released it officially.

The other witnesses are (1) Scott Hodge of the Tax Foundation, (2) Aviva Aron-Dine, who has DC tax policy think tank experience and is getting an economics PhD at MIT, and (3) Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute.

Unfortunately, this may conceivably shape up as a bit of a tag team event, with Aron-Dine and me on the Democrats' side and Hodge and Reynolds (neither of whom I have met) on the Republican side. But I hope not. There are things that we ought to be able to agree about, plus other things on which we ought to be able to agree on why & how we disagree.

If my several friends who do tax policy at AEI were among the Republican witnesses, I know that we would have this type of positive exchange. But how it turns out may depend on a combination of who people are and what sort of expectations they believe they face. (As an academic who doesn't want to be in Washington other than very occasionally, I am relatively exempt from such pressures.) And there are certainly some things in my testimony (albeit not everything) with which a principled conservative economist should be simpatico.

BTW, as this shows, I have published at Cato, in their Regulation Magazine.

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