Alvin Rabushka

Dr. Alvin Rabushka, the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, works in the public policy areas of taxation in the United States and abroad, economic development in the Pacific Rim countries, and the economies of Central and Eastern Europe. He is the author or coauthor of more than 20 books in the areas of race and ethnicity, aging, taxation, state and local government finances, and the economic development of Hong Kong and the Asian tigers of Taiwan, Korea and Singapore. Dr. Rabushka has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and in such popular outlets as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Fortune. He has consulted for, and testified before, a number of public agencies including the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Joint Economic Committee of the Congress, House Ways and Means Committee, Senate Finance Committee, 1981 White House Conference on Aging, and the Agency for International Development. In 1980, he served on President Ronald Reagan's Tax Policy Task Force. His books and articles on the flat tax provided the intellectual foundation for numerous flat-tax bills that were introduced in Congress during the 1980s and 1990s and the proposals of several presidential candidates in 1996 and 2000. He was recognized in money magazine's twentieth-anniversary issue Money Hall of Fame for the importance of his flat-tax proposal in bringing about passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986. He has lectured on tax policy in Hong Kong, Israel, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Canada, the Czech Republic, Austria, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and other countries. His pioneering work on the flat tax contributed to the adoption of the flat tax in 1994 in Estonia, followed by Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Romania, Slovakia, and Georgia. The flat tax is also under consideration in Croatia, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic. Rabushka received his A.B. in Far Eastern studies from Washington University (St. Louis) in 1962, followed by his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in political science from Washington University in 1966 and 1968. He spent 1963 in Hong Kong learning Chinese and 1966/67 in Malaysia for research on his doctoral dissertation. He taught at the University of Rochester (1968-1976) and the University of Hong Kong (1973). He joined the Hoover Institution in 1976.