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Session 16: Corporate Taxes: Raise? Remove? Reform?
One of the key fiscal policy decisions for the next President and Congress will be to set the level and role of corporate taxation. This panel, which includes an author of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, a longtime congressional analyst of tax proposals, and a former member of President Bush’s economic team, will lay out the choices and their consequences for the budget and the economy.
Presentations
Alan Viard's slides and remarks
Speakers
Kenneth D. Simonson
Associated General Contractors of America
Ken Simonson joined AGC of America on September 10, 2001. Ever since Day Two he has been provided insight into what was happening to the economy and what it implied for construction and related industries.
Ken’s weekly one-page email newsletter for AGC, The Data DIGest, provides 6000 readers with the latest economic news relevant to construction. He also sends out a variety of state-specific and tax news. He is interviewed and quoted almost daily by local and national media, including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Business Week, and CNBC. In addition, he has written eight booklets explaining tax provisions in plain English, and he contributes frequently to a variety of business and professional publications and conferences, including columns for Fleet Owner, a trucking magazine, and The Electrical Distributor.
Ken has 30 years of experience analyzing, advocating and communicating about economic and tax issues. Before joining AGC, he was senior economic advisor in the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy and 13 years. Earlier, he was vice president and chief economist for the American Trucking Associations. He also worked with the President’s Commission on Industrial Competitiveness, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, and an economic consulting firm.
Ken is a board member of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) and author of “Digging into Construction Data,” published in NABE’s journal, Business Economics. Since 1982, he has co-chaired the Tax Economists Forum, a professional meeting group he co-founded for leading researchers and policy makers among tax economists. He is vice president of Community Tax Aid, an organization that prepares returns for free for low-income taxpayers. He was one of the principal subjects of The Lobbyists, a bestseller by Jeffrey Birnbaum, now a writer for the Washington Post.
Ken has a BA in economics from the University of Chicago, an MA in economics from Northwestern University, and he has taken advanced graduate economics courses at the Universite de Paris, Johns Hopkins University and Georgetown University.
C. Eugene Steuerle
The Urban Institute
Eugene Steuerle is a senior fellow at The Urban Institute, codirector of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, columnist for Tax Notes, and the author or editor of 11 books, more than 150 reports and articles, more than 50 Congressional testimonies or reports, and more than 600 columns. His latest book is Contemporary Tax Policy. He serves on the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics and on advisory panels or boards for the Congressional Budget Office, the General Accounting Office, the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Actuarial Foundation, and the Independent Sector.
Previous positions include president of the National Tax Association (2001-2002), chair of the 1999 Technical Panel advising Social Security on its methods and assumptions, president of the National Economists Club Educational Foundation, deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for tax analysis (1987-1989), and resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Between 1984 and 1986, he served as economic coordinator and original organizer of the Treasury's tax reform effort, for which Treasury and White House officials have written that tax reform "would not have moved forward without your early leadership."
Dr. Steuerle's other books include: Social Security and the Family (coedited with Melissa Favreault and Frank Sammartino) and Nonprofits and Government (coedited with Elizabeth Boris). His columns have appeared mainly in three series: "Straight Talk on Social Security and Retirement Policy" for the Urban Institute, "Economic Perspective" for Tax Notes, and an "After Tax" column for the Financial Times.
Dr. Steuerle also has undertaken various missions for International Monetary Fund to China, Singapore, and Slovakia, while the government of Barbados undertook a tax reform effort modeled after a report that he coauthored as head of another mission.
Jane Gravelle
Congressional Research Service
Jane G. Gravelle is currently a Senior Specialist in Economic Policy in the Government and Finance Division of CRS, She specializes in the economics of taxation, particularly the effects of tax policies on economic growth and resource allocation. Recent papers have addressed consumption taxes, dynamic revenue estimating, investment subsidies, capital gains taxes, individual retirement accounts, estate and gift taxes, family tax issues, charitable contributions, and corporate taxation. In addition to her work at CRS she is the author of numerous articles in books and professional journals, including recent papers on the tax burdens across families and tax reform proposals. She is the author of a book, the Economic Effects of Taxing Capital Income, and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Taxation and Tax Policy. She is the editor of the Tax Expenditure Compendium published every two years by the Senate Budget Committee. She holds a B.A. and an M.A. in political science from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. in economics from George Washington University. She is past president of the National Tax Association and received the NTA’s public service award in 2007
Alan Viard
American Enterprise Institute
Prior to joining AEI, Alan Viard was a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and an assistant professor of economics at Ohio State University. He has also worked for the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis, the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, and the Joint Committee on Taxation of the U.S. Congress. Viard is also a frequent contributor to AEI's Tax Policy Outlook.
He has a Ph.D., M.A., economics, Harvard University and a B.A., economics, Yale University.
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