Republicans Tap Their Own Tax Mavens for 2016

When it comes to tax policy, Republican presidential candidates have a holy grail: tax cuts that pay for themselves by unleashing economic growth. In 2012, the dominant voice when it came to judging candidates’ proposals—from Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan to Rick Perry’s flat tax—was the Tax Policy Center (TPC), a Washington nonprofit jointly backed by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. Its leaders and advisers include prominent Democrats and a few Republicans. In the final months before the election, it released a study suggesting Mitt Romney’s tax claims didn’t add up. President Obama seized on the report, using it to argue that Republicans would raise taxes on the middle class. The campaign felt it had no way to fight back, says Lanhee Chen, then Romney’s policy director. “At the end of the day, there is something special about numbers,” he says. “There is something about what people perceive to be independent, hard analysis, even though you can argue that the TPC has its ideological leanings.”

Republicans have no intention of finding themselves in a similar position in 2016. In the past three years, donors have pumped millions into the Tax Foundation, a think tank whose analyses tend to be kinder to Republican proposals than those used by the TPC, which doesn’t assume tax cuts can boost growth. Take the tax plan Marco Rubio developed with Utah Senator Mike Lee. It would cut rates, let companies write off capital investments all at once rather amortizing them over several years, and eliminate taxes on capital gains and dividends. According to the Tax Foundation, that would unleash an economic boom, with an eventual net gain of $94 billion a year for the U.S. Treasury. A plan by Rand Paul to institute a consumption tax would have similar—though smaller—effects, according to the Tax Foundation. (The TPC hasn’t yet released an analysis of either plan.)