Dr. Robert Carroll, former senior economist for the Bush administration, will be the new executive in residence in the School of Public Affairs' department of public administration and policy.
Carroll was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers and former deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. He is also working as the vice president for economic policy at the Tax Foundation in D.C., a nonpartisan organization designed to educate taxpayers on the tax system and tax policy issues.
The university has a long history of bringing distinguished adjunct professors to the faculty from careers in civil service, SPA Dean William LeoGrande said in an e-mail. When university officials in the department of public administration and policy heard Carroll was leaving public service, they immediately considered him as a potential addition to the SPA faculty.
"The combination of real world experience and policy expertise that these faculty provide has proven to be a tremendous asset to our students," LeoGrande said. "[Carroll] is unquestionably one of the nation's top experts on tax policy, and we are very pleased to have him with us."
After four years at the Treasury Department, Carroll said he had been searching for an opportunity that would allow him to share his knowledge of tax policies with students without forgoing a direct role in the taxation policymaking process itself.
"The combination of being both at AU in an academic setting and being at the Tax Foundation in a think tank that's intimately involved in the tax policy debate within the Beltway kind of gives me the best of both worlds," he said.
In his role at the Treasury Department, Carroll headed the Office of Tax Analysis. As its senior adviser for tax issues, he was responsible for analyzing tax policies proposed by Congress, as well as developing or analyzing new policies from the Bush administration.
Carroll said that in the first six years of his time in office, President Bush had an agenda that focused largely on providing tax relief to families, low-income citizens and corporations. This policy was embodied in the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, which Carroll advocated extending on behalf of the administration.
Bush's 2003 tax cuts, which lowered the tax rate on capital gains and dividends, allowed corporate owners to keep a bigger portion of their profits, according to a March 2007 report published by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Another tax policy initiative that Carroll spearheaded during his yearlong stint as senior economist with the president's Council of Economic Advisers was a health care subsidy program, originally proposed by Bush last year. The program assured standard health insurance deductions of $15,000 for married couples and $7,500 for individuals. The goal of the subsidy was to encourage low-income citizens without insurance to apply for the program , Carroll said.
Carroll earned his master's degree and doctorate in economics at Syracuse University and his bachelor of science from the State University of New York at Albany.
