Heritage Foundation Leadership for America

summary:
Gary Robbins joins the Foundation as the Visiting Fellow in Tax Analysis. He will be working with CDA staff on two important projects: the Center’s efforts to institute reality based scoring by the Congress and the construction of the CDA’s second U.S. macroeconomic model. Gary is among a handful of the nation’s leading macroeconomists and has been a major player in federal tax reform over the past twenty years. Gary Robbins is President of Fiscal Associates, an Arlington, Virginia economic consulting firm. He developed The Fiscal Associates Inc. Model, a statistical, general equilibrium model of the U.S. economy. The Model explicitly incorporates detailed fiscal and monetary policies and their effects on both the real and financial sectors of the economy via the return to capital investment, interest rates, output, and employment.

Prior to forming Fiscal Associates, Gary served sixteen years in the U.S. Treasury Department. From 1982 to 1985, he was Chief of the Applied Econometrics Staff and Assistant to the Under Secretary for Tax and Economic Affairs between 1981 and 1982. During his tenure as Assistant to the Director of the Office of Tax Analysis (1975 to 1981), he worked on Blueprints for Tax Reform, the culmination of an effort to streamline and reduce economic disincentives in the federal tax code. In addition to coordinating revenue estimation, he coauthored the chapter on restructuring the medical deduction. During the early 1970s, Mr. Robbins was one of the developers of the Treasury Tax Model, which is still the basis for revenue estimates done by Treasury and the Joint Committee on Taxation. He is currently a member of the Joint Committee on Taxation’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Revenue Estimation.