Making a Tax Plan More Transparent

New methodology opens up the analysis behind Senator Elizabeth Warren’s progressive wealth tax.

A key part of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign platform is her proposed progressive wealth tax, a policy based on analysis by UC Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS), managed by CEGA, helped Saez and Zucman make their analysis more transparent by creating an open policy report that details all data, code, and assumptions behind the analysis. In addition to the report, they developed an online app that allows users to see how results change with adjusted assumptions, as well as an open online repository that stores all materials necessary to reproduce the analysis from scratch.

This project was based on the Open Policy Analysis approach developed by BITSS, which makes public data, code, materials, and clear accounts of methodological decisions to facilitate collaboration, discussion, and reuse. Open Policy Analysis aims to help policy debates transcend ideological differences and instead focus on the technical merits of policy proposals.