Attracting him a very great move by http://equitablegrowth.org, I must say...
Greg Leiserson has been killing it on tax policy this late summer and fall, most notably with The Tax Foundation’s score of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. But there is lots more good stuff as well:
Greg Leiserson (2017-11-09): The Tax Foundation’s score of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act: "First, the Tax Foundation appears to incorrectly model the interaction between federal and state corporate income taxes, thus overstating the effect of statutory rate cuts. Second, the Tax Foundation appears to treat the estate tax as a nondeductible annual property tax paid by businesses, which results in inflated estimates of the effect of repealing the tax. Appropriately addressing the issues raised in this note could reduce the Tax Foundation’s estimate of the increase in GDP that would result from the legislation to 1.9 percent—a reduction of roughly half—even if there are no other issues with the Tax Foundation’s estimates...."
Equitable Growth (2017-11-06): Research on Tap: Promoting equitable growth through tax reform: "Jason Furman... Melissa Kearney... Greg Leiserson..."
Jason Furman and Greg Leiserson (2017-11-01: The real cost of the Republican tax cuts: "They’ll require spending cuts, or tax increases in other areas. Either could hurt many American families..."
Greg Leiserson (2017-10-19): The ‘Unified Framework’ is a proposal for two new wasteful tax expenditures: "Judged against this true comprehensive income tax hypothetical, a sharply lower tax rate on corporate income would be appropriately viewed as a tax expenditure because the lower corporate rate would provide a preferential rate of tax for income earned by corporations compared to other sources of income such as wages..."
Greg Leiserson (2017-09-21): U.S. tax cuts for the rich won’t deliver gains for everyone: "In the special case of revenue-neutral reform—an ostensible target for current reform efforts in Congress—distribution tables capture the primary gains from increases in economic efficiency in their estimates of changes in after-tax income..."
Greg Leiserson (2017-09-21): Issue brief: If U.S. tax reform delivers equitable growth, a distribution table will show it: "Focusing on changes in economic output... ignores the potential for tax reform to have different impacts for people up and down the income ladder... overstates the economic gains from reform.... The greater risk in the coming months is not that distribution tables will understate the gains from tax reform, but rather that distribution tables will overstate the gains of reform and understate its regressivity if policymakers turn to tax cuts rather than tax reform and include a slate of temporary policies such as a one-time tax on overseas profits..."
Greg Leiserson (2017-09-14): Issue brief: What is the federal business-level tax on capital in the United States?: "Cutting the statutory tax rates on business income would do relatively little to encourage additional investment and thus have relatively little effect on growth, even before considering the effects of increased deficits resulting from the rate cuts or additional policies to offset that cost..."
Greg Leiserson (2017-08-17): In defense of the statutory U.S. corporate tax rate: "Fixation on the corporate tax rate is unfortunate and misguided. Business tax reform should be primarily about the tax base, not the tax rate. Treating the statutory rate as the key element of reform will inevitably result in a more expensive, more regressive, and less economically beneficial (if not actively harmful) reform than one that focuses on the tax base..."
Greg Leiserson (2017-06-15): It’s no surprise that the Kansas tax cut experiment failed to create jobs: "Claims of supply-side growth from tax cuts on business profits rely on the idea that... cutting statutory business tax rates would meaningfully reduce the effective tax rate on an incremental investment such that the tax cut causes businesses to increase investment... [and] the deficits resulting from the tax cuts would need to be small enough that they increase businesses’ cost of capital by less than the reduction resulting from the lower tax rate..."