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2004 US Presidential Election
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September 01, 2004
New York | Agenda For The 2nd Term: Tax Policy With Pam Olson

Pam Olson, who until recently was Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy at Treasury, spent some time on Bloggers’ Corner.

I’m trying to surface a variety of perspectives on what officials believe should be priorities for a second term. So you’re going to see the question I asked Pam Olson a lot:

“What do you believe should be the top three agenda items for tax policy in a second administration?”

Her response (paraphrased except where in quotation marks):

  1. Make the President’s enacted tax cuts permanent.
  2. Reduce the disincentive for people to save.
  3. Try to make the tax code less complex.

When I asked her if a second-term Bush administration would have to raise taxes to address growing deficits, she noted that current deficits are a very small relative percentage of total receipts ($3.1 trillion) coming to the Treasury. As such it’s hard to say “let’s take a radical” change of direction in response.

Indeed, she went so far as to suggest the current deficit, and the surplus and deficits that preceded it, are “rounding error” given the size of deficit to receipts.



Posted by Alan at September 1, 2004 07:23 PM | TrackBack
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