Obama has announced his selection for Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Policy, an important post that serves as the primary liaison between the executive branch and Congress on tax legislation. His choice is Michael Mundaca, currently an adviser to Secretary Geithner on tax issues. His career includes working at Ernst & Young, serving in the Clinton Treasury Department, and serving under Bush as Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Tax Affairs. See, e.g., the OECD's bio sketch on Mundaca, available here. (It describes Mundaca's Ernst & Young work as "focussed on cross-border planning and structuring...and on international legislative and regulatory monitoring and consulting". The latter likely includes a good bit of lobbying for corporate friendly international regs and laws.)
Rebecca Christie notes in her Bloomberg story on the Mundaca choice:
Mundaca's nomination, which must be confirmed by the Senate, completes Obama's picks for a new tax policy team at the Treasury Department. The others are Joshua Odintz, who has been a tax lawyer for the Senate Finance Committee; Stephen Shay, a partner with the Boston law firm Ropes & Gray LLP who previously served inthe department; Emily McMahon, currently deputy chief of staff for the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation; Mark Mazur, a former IRS executive; Mark Iwry, another Treasury Department veteran who served as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a lawyer for the firm Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, and George Bostick, a tax benefits lawyer who most recently worked for the firm Sutherland Asbill & Brennan LLP.
Obama's tax policy choices are all upstanding people, I'm sure, and quite competent. I wish they were all powerful voices for progressive taxation that would help lead us away from the capital-favoring policies of the Clinton and Bush years.
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