News – Page 2 – Matrix Global Advisors

Mar62018

Brief of Brill, Knoll, Mason, and Viard as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioner in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc.

March 6, 2018Filed Under: Testimony

The passage of time and changing circumstances have rendered the physical-presence requirement articulated in National Bellas Hess, Inc. v. Department of Revenue, 386 U.S. 753, 758 (1967), and Quill Corporation v. North Dakota, 504 U.S. 298, 324-15 (1992), a harmful anachronism. Standard tools of economic analysis that the Court considered in Comptroller of the Treasury v. Wynne reveal that South Dakota’s sales and use tax regime, as amended by S.B. 106, promotes neutral treatment of in-state and interstate commerce. By contrast, the bright-line physical-presence requirement set forth in Bellas Hess and Quill forces states to extend what is in practice a discriminatory subsidy in favor of a specific class of out-of-state sellers, namely, those sellers who lack a physical presence within the state. On the facts of the challenged statute, there is no valid economic reason to mandate such a discriminatory subsidy.

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Mar52018

Economist Warns Against Undoing Corporate Rate Cut

March 5, 2018Filed Under: Interviews

“[Alex] Brill noted that other developed countries have already begun to reduce, or have proposed reducing, their corporate rates in response to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (P.L. 115-97), which has in turn prompted some concerns of a “race to the bottom” of countries competing with each other by shrinking their corporate tax revenue base. If the United States reverted to a 35 percent corporate rate or even just partially undid the rate cut, it could put itself at an even greater competitive disadvantage than it was in before the TCJA’s passage, Brill said.”

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Mar12018

Assessing the Impact of Tax Reform: Remarks from Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT)

March 1, 2018Filed Under: Events

On Thursday morning at AEI, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT) gave remarks on the recently passed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. He discussed the impact of the new tax plan and what it means for the American economy moving forward.

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Feb82018

If Entitlement Reform is Too Hard, Lawmakers Can Take Baby Steps

February 8, 2018Filed Under: Op-Eds

The Washington Post reports that the U.S. deficit is headed to $1 trillion this year, the highest level since 2012. Republicans were furious about the large deficits under President Obama while he sought little to no spending constraint, but recently their focus has been elsewhere. How can we steer the fiscal outlook back toward sanity? As I see it, there are two options.

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Feb62018

Opioid Epidemic Costs WV $8.8 Billion Annually, Study Says

February 6, 2018Filed Under: Interviews

“What’s, unfortunately, unique in West Virginia, it’s not so much the rates of addiction, it’s the rates of death,” said Alex Brill, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “What’s most concerning is the high rate of opioid-related deaths.”

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Feb12018

The Political Economy of a Carbon Tax: A County-By-County Investigation

February 1, 2018Filed Under: Analysis

This report investigates the impact of a revenue-neutral carbon tax whereby revenues raised from a $25/ton carbon tax are used to reduce the tax rate on wage income by a commensurate amount. Recognizing that such a reform is not revenue-neutral for every single taxpayer, nor even revenue-neutral in every county, we investigate the degree of spatial variation across all counties and sort results by the historical partisan preferences of those counties.

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Jan292018

The Partisan Divide Over the Carbon Tax is all Smoke

January 29, 2018Filed Under: Op-Eds

Republican lawmakers who oppose a carbon tax are usually motivated by a belief that their constituents will get a raw deal. But standard political commentary on carbon taxation focuses on the higher costs for goods such as gasoline and electricity. Looking at who wins and who loses from a revenue-neutral carbon tax — one that also cuts existing taxes on work — yields a very different answer.

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Jan232018

FDA Should Approve Less Harmful Alternatives to Cigarettes

January 23, 2018Filed Under: Op-Eds

Cigarettes are known killers, with nearly one in five deaths each year in the United States attributable to smoking. But there is a chance that U.S. smokers may soon be able to choose a less harmful alternative.

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Jan162018

New State-Level Estimates of the Economic Burden of the Opioid Epidemic

January 16, 2018Filed Under: Op-Eds

No one disputes that opioid abuse has caused an epidemic in our country, one that costs tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions, of dollars per year. Less well known, but of vital importance to policymakers, is how these costs are distributed. Opioid abuse rates and deaths vary considerably from state to state, as do the costs associated with this epidemic. But researchers have generally focused on the economic impact of the crisis in the aggregate, at the US level. In a new analysis, I estimate the cost at the state level and find substantial variation across the country. Here, I offer a preview of my findings, which will be released in full next month.

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Jan52018

MGA’s Alex Brill on CNBC’s Squawk Box

January 5, 2018Filed Under: Interviews

“Those with a college degree or more have been enjoying a relatively tight labor market for a long time with unemployment rates near 2%. But it’s those with high school or less than high school degrees that had very high unemployment rates that now have the lowest unemployment rates they have ever seen around 5%. So things are pretty good across the spectrum both geographically and by the education dynamic.”

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