Advisors from the Obama and McCain camps - Austan Goolsbee from the University of Chicago and John Taylor from Stanford University, respectively - lay out the candidates' tax plans and duel over what they would mean for the American economy and the average family.
Leonard Burman of the Urban Institute-Brookings Institute joint Tax Policy Center and Joel Slemrod, Director of the Office of Tax Policy Research referee- Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs
Bio
Leonard Burman
Leonard Burman is a Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute and director of the Tax Policy Center. He is an expert in public finance and modeling the effects of government policies on individuals' and firms' decisions. He has held high-level positions in both the executive and legislative branches, serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis at the Treasury from 1998 to 2000, and as Senior Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. Dr. Burman is also a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute, and had previously taught economics at George Washington University and Bates College.
Dr. Burman is the author of The Labyrinth of Capital Gains Tax Policy: A Guide for the Perplexed, and numerous articles, studies, and reports. Dr. Burman's current research is focused on the changing role of taxation in social policy, pension and retirement policy, estate taxation, the alternative minimum tax, and tax policy with respect to health insurance.
Howard Gleckman
Howard Gleckman is a senior research associate at the Urban Institute and editor of TaxVox, the center’s tax and budget policy blog. He is a visiting fellow at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, where he specializes in long-term care issues. He is author of a forthcoming book on long-term care. He was formerly senior correspondent in the Washington bureau of Business Week and a former Media Fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Austan Goolsbee
Austan Goolsbee is a member of the Council of Economic Advisers and the youngest member of the cabinet of President Barack Obama. Goolsbee is also serving as staff director and chief economist on the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
Goolsbee was the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He was an economic adviser to Barack Obama's 2004 Senate race before becoming a senior economic adviser to Senator Obama's 2008 Presidential campaign.
He is a member of the panel of Economic Advisers to the Congressional Budget Office, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a research fellow at the American Bar Foundation. He is a Senior Economist to the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive Policy Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Times. He was recently a Fulbright Scholar and a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship.
His work focuses on the new economy, government policy, taxes, and technology.
Goolsbee was selected as one of Financial Times' six "'Gurus of the Future'/Best Under 40" (2005), named one of the Young Global Leaders at the 2005 World Economic Forum, and one of the 100 Global Leaders for Tomorrow at the 2002 World Economic Forum.
He was born on August 18, 1969, in Waco, Texas. He received his B.A. summa cum laude in economics from Yale University in 1991, his M.A. in economics from Yale University in 1991, and his Ph.D in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995.
Joel Slemrod
Professor Slemrod is the Paul W. McCracken Collegiate Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and also serves as Director of the Office of Tax Policy Research, an interdisciplinary research center housed at the Ross School.
John Taylor
John B. Taylor is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the Bowen H. and Janice Arthur McCoy Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He formerly served as the director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, where he is now a senior fellow, and he was founding director of Stanford's Introductory Economics Center.
Taylor's academic fields of expertise are macroeconomics, monetary economics, and international economics. He is known for his research on the foundations of modern monetary theory and policy, which has been applied by central banks and financial market analysts around the world. He has an active interest in public policy.
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