Larry Summers would like to portray himself as a progressive. In a paper he co-authored for the centrist Hamilton Project with his former PhD student Natasha Sarin and their research assistant Joe Kupferberg, Summers announced a “pragmatic approach” for making the tax system more...

Overall, TRA17 is not much worse than TRA86 or TRA14. It increases the deficit, but not by an impossible amount; it is distributionally skewed, but less so than is usually assumed; and its details are not terrible (on the international side they are a big improvement over prior law). There is one...

The current debate on whether the US tax base should be income or consumption has been waged in terms of the traditional criteria for evaluating tax policy - efficiency, equity and administrability. Proponents of the consumption tax have argued that it is superior to the income tax on all three...

This Book Review is divided into three Parts. Part I summarizes the main findings of Does Atlas Shrug?, emphasizing their contribution to the debate on taxing the rich. In general, those finding are inconclusive in regard to whether taxing the rich exacts an unacceptable economic price. Parts II...