February 25, 2016
Tonight’s debate will likely focus at some point on the candidates’ tax plans. The Wall Street Journal has a piece claiming that economists are more divided than usual on the Cruz tax plan. I don’t think that’s correct since there has been as much disagreement, if not more, among economists over the Rubio tax plan, and its giant child tax credit in particular.
I should note that I find it pretty exciting that this election cycle, all the major candidates on the Republican side have actually put out fundamental tax-reform plans. While all the proposals are different, they share common characteristics: They cut income-tax rates on households, lower the tax code’s bias against savings and investment, close some loopholes, and reform America’s anti-competitive corporate income-tax system. In other words, they all aspire to end in a better place and address some fundamental problems with the tax code; they are just taking different routes to get there.
In that context, I think it is important to understand that the debate around these plans, at least on the free-market side, has nothing to do with whether or not a particular plan would be an improvement over the status quo but rather it is a debate about which one of these plans is the best. In fact, I am often asked which one is my favorite plan and I have a hard answering that question precisely because there are a lot of things I like about each plan and a few things I dislike (more or less intensely) about each of them, too. Today, I will focus on the Cruz and Rubio plans since they seem to be the two people think of as opposites.
Read the full article at National Review Online: Debate Over the Cruz and Rubio Tax Plans