MIDDLEBURY — The income tax is fundamental both to the fiscal health of the United States and to efforts to promote equality in after-tax income. However, the ability and willingness of the federal government to tax income broadly have waned over the past 40 years.
Professor Andrew A. Samwick of Dartmouth College will address this important issue when he delivers the D. K. Smith ’42 Fall 2018 Economics Lecture next week.
The lecture, which Samwick titled “Income Tax Policy and Economic Growth,” will take place on Wednesday, Sept. 26, beginning at 4:30 p.m. It will take place in the Robert A. Jones ’59 House Conference Room on the Middlebury College campus.
In this lecture Samwick, an Economics professor and director of Dartmouth’s Nelson A. Rockefeller Center, will briefly:
•  review the history of efforts to make taxes more fair, focusing on the arguments that have been used to undermine the income tax,
•  identify the key moments where policy changed and the wrong lessons were learned, and
•  discuss alternative strategies that may lead to better outcomes going forward.
Dr. Samwick will then consider the economic impact of President Trump’s recently passed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, including on the concepts of budget balance, the appropriate definition of income under an income tax, the link between tax policy and economic growth, and the unique challenges that may be posed for fiscal policy as the Baby Boom generation fully enters retirement.
Samwick graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1989, and earned his PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is very active in the academic community.