VP Federal Tax @TaxFoundation. @StLawrenceU Alum. Arkansan. North Country NY Native. Aspiring aviation nerd. Married to @VictoriaBell. All views my own.
Farmington, Arkansas
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Exciting career news: I am stepping into the role of Vice President of Federal Tax Policy @TaxFoundation.
When I joined @TaxFoundation nearly 8 years ago, I saw it as one of the best places to educate taxpayers and make principled, pro-growth tax policy changes a reality. 🧵 1/6
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Garrett Watson retweeted
On the other hand, US tariff policy has changed more than 50 times under this administration.
Economic growth accelerates when businesses are able to invest, innovate, and compete rather than navigate unnecessary bureaucracy.
Under @POTUS, 129 regulations have been eliminated for every new rule introduced. By reducing red tape, the Trump Administration has created an environment where businesses can expand, hire, and invest in the American economy.
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Jensen asserted that the decline of manufacturing jobs in America over the last few decades is not due to technology, but to outsourcing. This is flatly incorrect - the vast majority of the decline in manufacturing's share of employment is due to technology, not trade.
Tomorrow on the show: @JensenHuang, the CEO of NVIDIA, who thinks A.I. fear is getting way out of hand.
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Responding to some comments and questions on the analysis I wrote with @DiSalvoPhD on "Capital Is Not Taking Half of America’s Income, and Other Myths About the “Labor Share”"
ericadyork.substack.com/p/mo…
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AI is getting cheaper more quickly than any other transformative tech in history. At a given level of performance, cost has fallen ~47%/quarter since 2023.
That’s 4× faster than DNA sequencing, 6× faster than compute, 18× faster than lithium batteries, and (up to 1973) 54× faster than electricity.
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For many conservatives, the term “tax expenditure” has acquired a taint because the official lists include provisions that provide relief from double taxation, which hardly sounds like a subsidy.
In my latest newsletter I tackle the topic of spending in the tax code.
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CAPITO says no permitting agreement yet to announce but added:
“I think the moment can be met this week.”
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SCOOP: Trump signals he would ease his administration's blockade on wind projects to entice Democrats to agree to a permitting deal. He told top aides he'd agree to direct DOD to start clearing its queue of long-delayed onshore wind projects subscriber.politicopro.com/a…
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The rent seeking discussion is important, but note that successful entrepreneurs can provide plenty of value without inventing something new or being disruptive.
Ventures in distribution, the trades, or sales provide value without being the most interesting lines of work.
The American Dream Is Still Alive, for Cronies
Is the American dream still alive? In a recent @WSJ article, @omzidar and Eric Zwick claim it is. Yet, their book provides a more nuanced picture.
The millionaires they celebrate are not inventors, creative entrepreneurs, disruptive innovators: they are mostly rent seekers. From car dealers to beer distributors, from real estate brokers to real estate developers, their “everywhere millionaires” resemble more a list of antitrust violations than a monument to American ingenuity.
Does the American dream amount to achieving an antitrust exemption? To find out, listen to the latest episode of Capitalisn’t where Bethany and I discuss these issues with Eric: piped.video/watch?v=qHha_z-0…
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The entire idea of the deficit being meaningfully addressed by DOGE without Congressional action was a pipe dream sold by folks who either have no idea what drives the deficit or weren't being honest in the first place.
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Source: washingtonpost.com/technolog…
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Reminder: US schools serving low-income and non-white communities get more money per pupil not less and have for a long time
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As sympathetic as I am to principals and teachers, if you run a school that routinely fails to supervise young kids at lunch, or that neglects to review a student's math work for errors, *you should be fired.* That no one demands this or imagines it possible is a problem.
The real takeaway from the Nikole Hannah-Jones article is that teachers and administrators are failing black and Latino kids, and that New York City (and other cities, presumably) has to stop sitting on its hands and take action to meaningfully change this.
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When properly measured, consistent with how we assess progressivity in tax policy, Social Security benefits are progressive.
Read more: hubs.ly/Q04xW4ry0
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Characteristically shrewd reporting from Shaun, citing Czechs, Latvians and Estonians. My advice, based on my own conversations in the past 72 hours, is this: Do not conflate assessments of what might happen with assessments of what will or is likely to happen. The probability of escalation in so-called "hybrid attacks" (read: acts of Russian state terrorism) remains the NATO consensus. That is dangerous enough to warrant a collective European response without panic over Article V and its perceived wobbliness, hypotheticals that play right into Moscow's hands. Also be mindful of how European countries facing upcoming elections are instrumentalizing threats, both real and perceived, for electoral purposes. Main takeaway: if this chatter leads to greater vigilance and defense commitments, great. But those should be the goal anyway, without the hysteria.
I spoke to three European intelligence heads over the past week to try to understand how seriously to take the latest “Russia attack” scare.
theguardian.com/world/2026/s…
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There’s been a recent flurry of chatter about Social Security. Absent an act of Congress, beneficiaries face a 22% cut beginning in late 2032/early 2033. how do we preserve the program while avoiding job-killing tax increases? In today's newsletter, I enter the chat:
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RT @USCBO: In CBO's projections, the gap between Social Security's outlays and revenues generally widens over the next 75 years, and the ba…
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Expensing for capital investment is not a special tax break. Expensing aligns the timing of tax deductions with the timing of actual capital expenditures so that the tax code does not discourage marginal investment projects.
Read more: hubs.ly/Q04xNQS-0
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The US federal government faces several fiscal challenges in the coming decades, including the growing burden of federal healthcare programs and tax preferences.
Read more: hubs.ly/Q04xNQns0
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