In retrospect, this from the usually-reliable Karl Smith and Brandon Arnold looks really, really, really awful, no?
But they really should have known better: Anyone who goes the extra mile to give the version of Kevin Hassett on display these days the benefit of the doubt is likely to wind up naked on the Moon. That, I think, is the real lesson here—shading your thoughts to think more highly of Kevin these days either out of comity or because you think he is broadly on your policy side will put you in the same position as those who surrender their dignity to Donald Trump: Karl Smith and Brandon Arnold: Kevin Hassett’s Defense of Tax Reform is Right on Point: "The Tax Policy Center... had recently issued a report suggesting that the “Big Six” tax-reform proposal would add nearly $2.4 trillion to the budget deficit over the next ten years, raise taxes on many upper-middle class households, and slash taxes for the top 1 percent. Mr. Hassett was invited to respond to the report. His remarks were, unsurprisingly, unsparing. After all, the government’s top economist shouldn’t sit quietly while premature invectives are launched at the administration’s signature fiscal proposal...
...He accused the Tax Policy Center of rushing to judgment and issuing a report before key details were available. The Big Six had released only a framework designed to guide negotiations, not a reform plan. In lieu of those details, the Tax Policy Center made a host of assumptions, nearly all disfavorable to the plan and some in direct contrast to the guidance laid out in the framework.... The framework explicitly leaves open the possibility for a fifth tax bracket for high-income earners, calls for expanding the child tax credit without giving a specific number, and states that the new system should be at least as progressive as the current one. But in assessing the proposal’s progressivity, the Tax Policy Center assumed there would be no fifth bracket and only a modest boost to the child tax credit. More crucially, the Tax Policy Center made sweeping assumptions about the impact of corporate tax cuts without making those assumptions transparent. Recent research has suggested that workers bear an increasing share of the burden from the corporate tax....
Mr. Hassett’s criticism of the Tax Policy Center report was well justified. By ignoring the framework’s progressivity goals and making no mention of the changing dynamics of corporate taxation, it introduced partisanship into what has been the most bipartisan proposal to come out of the Trump administration so far.... Nonetheless, in the days that followed, it was Mr. Hassett who faced the harshest critique, and not the Tax Policy Center’s report. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers wrote in the Washington Post that Mr. Hassett and his colleagues were “some combination of ignorant, disingenuous and dishonest.” New York Times columnist and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman accused Hassett of “shlock” reminiscent of the dangerous predictions during the Great Recession that low interest rates would be deflationary or that the economy would collapse if the debt-to-GDP ratio rose above 90 percent. These critiques are unfortunate and do not serve the larger debate....
Research on the corporate tax championed by Mr. Hassett is an effort to grapple with the effects of those new realities. The plan deserves a fair hearing. Despite criticism from a number of individuals and organizations, we cannot afford to sit idly while our economy languishes.
#shouldread
