The Tax and Expenditure Program of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University concludes its two-day conference on Is It Time For Fundamental Tax Reform? The Known, the Unknown and the Unknowable.  Today’s panels and papers are:

Session 3: Consumption Tax Reform: The Known, The Unknown, and The Unknowable

• Simplifying Assumptions: How Might the Politics of Consumption Tax Reform Affect (Impair) the End Product?, by Dan Shaviro (NYU)
  • Discussants:
    • James Alm (Georgia State)
    • George K. Yin (Virginia)
• Consumption Tax Reform: The Effect of Business Equity and Housing Price Changes on Intergenerational Redistributions, by John W. Diamond (Rice) & George R. Zodrow (Rice)
  • Discussants:
    • Leonard E. Burman (The Urban Institute)
    • Alan Viard (Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas)
• Behavioral Economics and Fundamental Tax Reform, by Edward J. McCaffery (USC)
  • Discussants:
    • Pamela Moomau (Joint Committee on Taxation)
    • Jeff Strnad (Stanford)
• Tax Reform in the 21st Century: The Known, The Unknown, and The Unknowable, by Alan J. Auerbach (Cal-Berkeley)
  • Discussants:
    • Henry J. Aaron (The Brookings Institution)
    • James Poterba (MIT)

A live webcast of today’s proceedings is available here.