Matt Yglesias

Orszag on Saez

I see that on Monday, Peter Orszag did a blog post about Bates Medal winner Emmanuel Saez’s work and its policy implications:

Emmanuel’s work on income inequality has helped to point the way for the Administration in its pledge to rebalance the tax code, with a tax cut going to 95 percent of working Americans while asking those at the very top to contribute more. The inequality that has arisen over the past three decades is not going to go away overnight, and it has been driven by many factors—including a decline in the growth rate of college-educated workers. But where the prior administration used changes in the tax code to exacerbate these trends, this Administration thinks that the tax code should be used to mitigate them because an economy in which all can enjoy success is one that is strong for us all.

Good stuff. In the long run, I expect Saez’s work on taxes and elasticity to prove even more influential, as I think it lays out the rationale for an approach to tax reform that could raise a ton of revenue in a progressive manner at a low economic cost.