Hi, I'm Scott Lundscombe, the vice president of general economics and trade at the Cato Institute.

And I'm Adam Michelle. I'm the director of tax policy studies here at Cato.

And we're here today to talk tax policy, tariff policy, and the one big, beautiful bill that is making its way through Congress.

The most beautiful.

Yes. And there's another B in there, I think, for some people.

So, Adam, let's just, let's get right into it. Why, okay, we're going to talk about the OBBBB, whatever.

But why are we at this moment in tax policy?

I think that's a great place to start.

We are here because Republicans in 2017 passed a large tax reform bill.

This is the biggest reform of the tax code we've seen in 30 years.

But because they faced budget pressures and

complicated rules in the Senate, they didn't want to put the full sort of cost of the tax cut

on paper. They made most of it expire. And the majority of those tax cuts and tax simplifications

were also included expire at the end of

this year. And so Congress has to do something. This is the forcing mechanism they have in front of

them. And this is the something that they're doing. Yeah. So let's say nothing passes. What's the tax hike we're looking at at the end of the year?

Yeah, so it's about a $500 billion a year tax increase on the American economy writ large.

But that doesn't really get at all of the moving pieces. For sort of your typical taxpayer, it would be a couple thousand dollar tax increase.

It would mean the tax code becomes more complicated again.

A lot of the simplifications in 2017 of moving people from the more complicated itemizing

universe into the larger standard deduction just means that tax paying got simpler and that all goes

away.

...