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CSTR
Leadership
Ernest S. Christian
Bill
Frenzel
Murray
Weidenbaum
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Ernest
S. Christian, Executive Director
Ernest S. Christian has been at the forefront
of federal tax policy for more than three decades -- as a
Treasury tax official in the Ford Administration, as a member
of President Reagan's Tax Transition Team in 1980-81 that
helped produce the historic tax reforms in the 1981 Tax Act,
as a senior partner in a Washington law firm until 1994, and,
since then, as the executive director of the Center For Strategic
Tax Reform, which has been producing analytical papers and
holding monthly seminars on tax reform for nearly ten years.
Christian is a frequent lecturer and prolific author whose
ideas have had an immediate impact on tax policy. He has on
several occasions been profiled by the National Tax Journal
as one of Washington's most influential tax policy experts
and has recently been widely noted in the press as the creator
of the "Five Easy Pieces" approach to tax reform.
Ernest Christian has been a consistent and persistent advocate
of tax reform. He assisted the late Senator Roth and others
in a proposed redesign of business taxation (S. 1105) in 1985.
He helped design two other fundamental tax reform proposals
that were the subject of congressional hearings in the 1980s
and 1990s; was the leading draftsman of the comprehensive
rewrite of the income tax code sponsored by Senators Domenici
and Nunn (S. 722) in 1995, which was acclaimed by many as
the high watermark of tax reform to that date; and updated
and simplified a newer and simpler version in 2003 for Congressman
Phil English (H.R. 269).
The following is a partial list of his major writings:
"The
Tax Restructuring Phenomenon: Analytical Principles and
Political Equation,"
National Tax Journal, September, 1995.
"The
International Components of Tax Reform: Tax Policy that
Serves the National Interest," Parts I and II,
International Journal of Taxation, July 2003 and
February 2004.
"De-Radicalizing
Tax Reform," Tax Notes, April 13, 1998.
"How
Much Simplification Is Enough? Is A Returnless Tax Realistic?"
Tax Notes, December 23, 1996.
Co-author of "USA Tax System -- Description and
Explanation of the Unlimited Savings Allowance Income Tax
System," Tax Notes Special Supplement, March 10,
1995
Co-author of Value
Added Tax: Orthodoxy and New Thinking, Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1989.
Mr. Christian's writings have also appeared in The Financial
Times (2004), The Washington Times (2002 and 2003)
and The Washington Post (1995). Major publications in
which he or his tax reform ideas have been referenced include
Fortune, U.S News and World Report, Business Week, The Washington
Post, The Washington Times, The National Journal, The Christian
Science Monitor and The New Yorker.
Mr. Christian is a cum laude graduate of the University
of Texas School of Law; a Life Member of the American Tax Policy
Institute; a Member of the American Law Institute; a Fellow
of the American College of Tax Counsel; and serves on the board
of directors of the Institute for Research on the Economics
of Taxation.
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