Tax Reform Topic of Annual Baker Conference

Tax Reform Topic of Annual Baker Conference

BY DANA DURBIN
Rice News Staff
Oct. 1, 1998

The James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy 1998 annual conference, "Tax
Reform For the Millennium," will be held Nov. 5 and 6 at Baker Hall on the
Rice campus.

The two-day conference will explore a wide variety of issues associated with fundamental
reform in the tax system in the United States. Such reforms, which involve a change
in the tax base from income to consumption, have received serious attention in
recent years from academics, politicians and other groups.

Tax reform proposals that will be discussed and debated include the national retail
sales tax, the flat tax and the value-added tax, according to Peter Mieszkowski,
Rice’s Cline Professor of Economics. Mieszkowski and Professor of Economics and
Department Chair George Zodrow are the academic organizers of the conference.

Conference participants will examine a host of issues related to tax policy reforms,
including their economic impacts, international effects, transitional problems,
distributional effects, administrative and compliance costs and political implications.

"This is not a conference to promote tax reform," Mieszkowski said.
"Our objective is to have a debate and discuss in some depth the issues raised
by tax policy reform."

Participants include proponents of reform, such as Rep. Bill Archer of Houston,
as well as those who are skeptical of the benefits of tax reform, Mieszkowski
added.

The conference will begin with a panel discussion on tax reform. Participants
include Archer, who is the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee; Robert
Hall of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, one of the creators of
the flat tax proposal; Michael Graetz, who is a leading tax scholar from the Yale
University law school and a former treasury official; Jane Gravelle, a well-known
tax researcher at the Congressional Research Service; and John Karl Scholz, who
is currently at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Economics and
recently left the Treasury Department.

On the conference’s second day, several academic participants will present research
papers relating to their areas of expertise. "We are planning to publish
the papers in a Baker Institute conference volume, which hopefully will become
a prominent source of information on the critical issues raised by consumption
tax reforms," Zodrow said.

The second day will be broken into two sessions. Zodrow will moderate the first
session, scheduled from 8:15 a.m. to noon. It will include an introduction by
Baker Institute Director Edward Djerejian and an overview on tax reform by Rice
President Malcolm Gillis, who is also the Kenneth Zingler Professor of Economics
and for many years has been involved with tax reform in the United States and
abroad.

Participants in this first session and the issues they will discuss are Dale Jorgenson,
Harvard University Department of Economics, and Gravelle of the Congressional
Research Service, both of whom will discuss the effects of tax reform on economic
behavior; Charles Ballard, Michigan State University Department of Economics,
on international issues; and Glenn Hubbard, Columbia University School of Business,
on the extent to which capital is taxed under a consumption tax. The session will
conclude with a panel discussion and a question and answer period.

The second session, set for 1:30-5 p.m., will be moderated by Mieszkowski. Participants
and their topics are Zodrow on reform-induced transitional problems; Mieszkowski
and Michael Palumbo of the University of Houston Economic Department on the distributional
implications of reform; William Gale, the Brookings Institute, and Janet Holtzblatt
of the U.S. Treasury Department, on administrative and compliance aspects of various
reform proposals; Sijbren Cnossen, Erasmus University, on the European perspective
on consumption tax reform; and Joe Barnes, Rice University Baker Institute, on
the political aspects.

This session will also conclude with a panel discussion and question and answer
period.