Wednesday, February 25, 2009

AEI session on Viard (ed.), Tax Policy: Lessons from the 2000s

This morning I appeared as a discussant at an AEI book panel in Washington, concerning the above book. I offered comments on 3 excellent papers, by (1) Alan Viard and John Diamond concerning unfinanced tax cuts, (2) Dhammika Dharmapala concerning the 2003 dividend tax cuts, and (3) Alan Auerbach and Kevin Hassett concerning the dividend tax cuts and bonus depreciation.

Power Point slides for my comments, which I tried to make reasonably lively, can be found at the upper right hand side of the webpage here. Among other things, I explore the "Three Bears" theory of the stimulative effects of bonus depreciation, and disagree with Laurence Kotlikoff (a commentator on one of three papers) regarding the definition of rationality.

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