CSTR
Leadership

Ernest S. Christian

Bill Frenzel

Murray Weidenbaum

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 prominent 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 twenty years.

He has been profiled by the National Journal as one of Washington's most influential tax policy experts.

He was the leading draftsman of the comprehensive rewrite of the income tax code known as the "USA Tax". It was sponsored by Senators Sam Nunn and Pete Domenici (S. 722) in 1995 and is still today acclaimed by many as the high watermark of tax reform. In 2003, he wrote a new and simpler version for Congressman Phil English (H.R. 269).

Presently, he is drafting a new pro-growth tax code for consideration by the 113th Congress in 2013 and is writing a book entitled "The Politics and Economics of Taxation: Let's Stop Shooting Ourselves in the Foot".

The following is a partial list of his writings:

- "The Private-Sector Cost of $1 in Government Tax Revenue," Tax Notes, June 26, 2006.
- "Dangers of a Value-Added Tax," Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2009.
- "A Value-Added Tax Fuels Big Government," Wall Street Journal, August 24, 2011.
- "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.
- "The Tax Restructuring Phenomenon: Analytical Principles and Political Equation," National Tax Journal, September, 1995.
- "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 newspaper columns appear frequently in the Investor's Business Daily. He or his tax reform ideas have also been referenced in the Financial Times, Fortune, U.S News and World Report, Business Week, the Washington Post, 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; and a Fellow of the American College of Tax Counsel.