This morning Bloomberg.com published an article discussing President Obama’s recent decision to put former Federal Reserve Chairman, Paul Volcker, in charge of a tax code review. You can find a snippet of the story below, or checkout Bloomberg.com.
President Barack Obama is putting former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker in charge of a tax-code review aimed at closing loopholes, streamlining the law and generating revenue, budget Director Peter Orszag said.
Volcker, 81, who heads the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, is being asked to take a look at the laws in an effort to rebalance the tax system.
Orszag said the review, given a deadline of Dec. 4, is being ordered to make recommendations on steps to simplify the code, built over the last 96 years, in ways that would reduce tax evasion and what he called “corporate welfare.”
“There are hundreds of billions of dollars in uncollected taxes each year,” Orszag said in a conference call. The Volcker board “will be examining ways of being even more aggressive on reducing the tax gap.”
The tax gap is the difference between the amount of taxes owed by taxpayers and companies and the amount collected. Orszag cited academic studies suggesting that the difference is $300 billion or more. That is “ a lot of money,” he said, adding that the administration is going to be “as aggressive as possible” in reducing it.
Obama made a tax overhaul part of his platform during the presidential campaign. One goal is to close loopholes that he said reward companies that move jobs overseas.
Task Force
Austan Goolsbee, a senior economic adviser to the president, will be named staff director of the task force, which will report back to Volcker, Orszag said. Members of the panel will include Harvard University’s Martin Feldstein, former chief economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan; Laura D’Andrea Tyson, a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley and former economic adviser to President Bill Clinton; Roger Ferguson, chief executive officer of Teachers Insurance & Annuity Association and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve; and William Donaldson, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
