t is unfortunate that insults have replace substantive policy debate in the race for the Republican nomination because we should be enjoying a spirited debate over how to overhaul the tax code. Never before has there been a presidential campaign in which so many candidates put forward such well-developed, pro-growth tax reform plans. At one point in the race, as many as eleven candidates had released substantive tax reform plans.

Although the field is shrinking, the tax plans of the three leading Republican candidates, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump, can still offer a useful guide to which policies could form the basis of true tax reform in 2017 and which policies should be avoided. Using the Tax Foundation's Taxes and Growth macroeconomic tax model, we find that the Rubio and Cruz plans offer credible ideas for improving the tax code while the Trump plan does not.

Tax reform involves tradeoffs between three competing priorities: economic growth, tax revenues, and equity concerns (who pays and how much). The challenge for reformers is that you cannot easily have all three. We saw this with the plan drafted in 2014 by former Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp. Although the plan was revenue neutral and maintained the same distributional balance between the rich and poor, it delivered very little of what should be the primary goal of tax reform, economic growth.

Read the full article at RealClearMarkets.com: Which GOP Candidate's Tax Plan Is the Most Pro-Growth?