Heritage Foundation Leadership for America

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Lawrence Whitman is the director of the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, and directs all analyses of tax, budget, and economic issues.

Whitman comes to Heritage from Capitol Hill, where he served more than two years as senior economist for the Joint Economic Committee, advising members of Congress on economic, budget, tax, Social Security, technology, trade, and financial market issues. The Joint Economic Committee is one of only four committees on Capitol Hill composed of both House and Senate members, and was created in 1946, along with the President's Council of Economic Advisers, to review economic conditions and recommend improvements in economic policy. While with the Committee, Whitman focused on the capital gains tax, publishing a report in 1999 that analyzed the effects of the 1997 rate reduction. Whitman was also responsible for developing and drafting "The Citizen's Guide to the U.S. Economy," an annual report from the Committee.

Before his work on Capitol Hill, Whitman spent several years on Wall Street, including work at the investment firms of Goldman Sachs and Salomon Brothers. While at Goldman Sachs, Whitman worked in municipal finance, advising state and local governments on raising capital for projects and state and local financings. At Salomon Brothers, he focused on corporate finance, advising companies on how to structure their complex financial transactions.

In one of his first analyses for Heritage in 2002, Whitman wrote that the way to reverse the economic slowdown is to reduce government barriers to economic expansion imposed by high tax rates on working, saving, investing, and business development. The less government punishes these activities, Whitman said, the more the economy would grow. Later in the year, Whitman wrote about the probable causes of the rash of corporate scandals, concluding that lowering the corporate tax rate and tax rate on dividends would decrease the tax bias in favor of debt vs. equity financing and retaining vs. distributing profits, and would limit the likelihood of future corporate bankruptcies and scandals.

Whitman holds a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated Summa cum Laude and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, an academic honor society. He received a master's degree in Public Affairs from Princeton University. He has commented on economic issues for national and local television news programs, and his writings have appeared in several major newspapers.