EVENTS

Date:	Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Time:	9:00 AM -- 11:00 AM
Location:	Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

Speaker biographies

Rosanne Altshuler is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and codirector of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. She is on leave from Rutgers University, where she is a professor of economics. Ms. Altshuler served as senior economist to the President's Advisory Panel of Federal Tax Reform in 2005 and has been a special adviser to the Joint Committee on Taxation as well as a consultant to the U.S. Treasury Department and Canadian Department of Finance. She has published numerous articles on the economics of taxation and edited the National Tax Journal, the leading academic tax journal, from 2001 through 2006.

Chris Edwards is the director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute. He is a top expert on federal and state tax and budget issues. Before joining Cato in 2001, Mr. Edwards was senior economist on the congressional Joint Economic Committee, examining tax, budget, and entrepreneurship issues. From 1994 to 1998, he was a consultant and manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers, examining fiscal issues under consideration in Congress. From 1992 to 1994, he was an economist at the Tax Foundation. Mr. Edwards's articles on tax and budget policies have appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Investor's Business Daily, and other newspapers. He is the author of Downsizing the Federal Government (Cato Institute, 2005) and coauthor of Global Tax Revolution (Cato Institute, 2008).

Kevin A. Hassett is the director of economic policy studies and a resident scholar at AEI. He is also a weekly columnist for Bloomberg. Before joining AEI, Mr. Hassett was a senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and an associate professor of economics and finance at Columbia Business School. He was an economic adviser to the George W. Bush campaign in the 2004 presidential election and was the chief economic adviser to Senator John McCain during the 2000 presidential primaries and the 2008 presidential campaign. He has also served as a policy consultant to the U.S. Department of the Treasury during both the former Bush and Clinton administrations. Mr. Hassett is a member of the Joint Committee on Taxation's Dynamic Scoring Advisory Panel. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of six books on economics and economic policy, including Toward Fundamental Tax Reform (AEI Press, 2005). He has published scholarly articles in The American Economic Review, Economic Journal, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Public Economics, and many other professional journals. Mr. Hassett's popular writings have been published in the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, USA Today, the Washington Post, and numerous other outlets. His economic commentaries are regularly aired on radio and television, including recent appearances on the Today Show, CBS's Morning Show, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Hardball, Moneyline, and Power Lunch.

Lawrence B. Lindsey is the president and CEO of the Lindsey Group and a visiting scholar at AEI. He has held leading positions in government, academia, and business. Prior to forming the Lindsey Group, he served as the assistant to the president and the director of the National Economic Council at the White House and was the chief economic adviser to the George W. Bush campaign during the 2000 presidential election. Mr. Lindsey also served as a governor of the Federal Reserve System from 1991 to 1997, as a special assistant to the president for domestic economic policy during the George H. W. Bush administration, and as a senior staff economist for tax policy at the Council of Economic Advisers during President Ronald Reagan's first term. Mr. Lindsey served for five years on the economics faculty of Harvard University and held the Arthur F. Burns Chair for Economic Research at AEI. From 1997 until 2001, he was the managing director of Economic Strategies, a global consulting firm. He is the author of numerous articles and three books: The Growth Experiment (Basic Books, 1991), Economic Puppetmasters (AEI Press, 1998), and What a President Should Know . . . but Most Learn Too Late (AEI Press, 2008).

Tom Petri (R-Wisc.), who represents Wisconsin's Sixth Congressional District, is serving his fifteenth term in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is the ranking Republican on the Aviation Subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. He served for twelve years as chairman of that committee's Highways, Transit and Pipelines Subcommittee and of an earlier subcommittee with similar responsibilities. He is a former vice chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, now the Committee on Education and Labor. From 1987 through 1990, Representative Petri served as a member of the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, better known as the House Ethics Committee. He is a former chairman of the House British-American Parliamentary Group, an official organization formed to strengthen relations with the British Parliament. Representative Petri's important legislative initiatives have included those in the areas of student loan reform, the allocation of money for federal highway spending, cost-sharing for federal water projects, tax and welfare reform, banking policy, campaign reform, and health care reform.

Alan D. Viard is a resident scholar at AEI. Prior to joining AEI, he was a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and an assistant professor of economics at Ohio State University. He has also worked for the Treasury Department's Office of Tax Analysis, the President's Council of Economic Advisers, and the Joint Committee on Taxation. Mr. Viard has written on a wide variety of tax and budget issues.

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