Dueling Tax Plans: What Would McCain and Obama Do?
A conversation with the candidates' top economic advisers

Sponsored by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center
Wednesday, July 23, 2008, Noon–1:30 p.m. EDT (light lunch will be served)
Katharine Graham Conference Center, Urban Institute
2100 M Street, N.W., Washington, DC

Listen to the audio recording

View the transcript

Senior policy advisers Austan Goolsbee of the Obama campaign and Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the McCain campaign will make the case for their candidates’ tax plans in a lively exchange moderated by Urban Institute President Robert Reischauer. The event, hosted by the Tax Policy Center, will begin with an updated and expanded analysis of the candidates’ tax proposals by TPC Director Len Burman. Participants will address questions from the audience.

Dr. Goolsbee is the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and codirector of the Initiative on Global Markets. He is a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow with the American Bar Foundation, and was an Economic Scene columnist for The New York Times.

Dr. Holtz-Eakin served as the director of the Congressional Budget Office and as chief economist and senior staff economist on the Council of Economic Advisers. He has taught at Columbia and Princeton universities and was the economics department chair, trustee professor of economics, and associate director of the Maxwell Center for Policy Research at Syracuse University. Most recently, he was a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Featured Speakers

• Austan Goolsbee, senior economic policy adviser, Obama ’08
• Douglas Holtz-Eakin, senior economic policy adviser, John McCain 2008

Analysis of the Candidates’ Tax Plans

• Len Burman, director, Tax Policy Center, and senior fellow, Urban Institute

Moderator

• Robert Reischauer, president, Urban Institute

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center does not endorse political candidates. This session is part of a series on presidential candidates’ tax plans.

The Tax Policy Center’s most recent analysis of the McCain and Obama tax plans is available here. We plan to update the report before the event and will announce the update on the TPC home page and in the TPC newsletter.