The tax reform process that culminated in the December 2017 enactment of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act followed an unusual pattern regarding business tax reform. In particular, the original proposal, the “Blueprint” put forward by Republicans in the House of Representatives in June 2016 (Tax Reform Task Force 2016) called for the adoption of an approach that, at the time, was unfamiliar to many in the economics profession, a destination-based cash-flow tax (DBCFT). TheDBCFTwould have represented a sharp break from current policy, and the general lack of familiarity with it led many business leaders, policy makers, and economists to misinterpret its aims, characteristics, and properties. The paper by Omar Barbiero, Emmanuel Farhi, Gita Gopinath, and Oleg Itskhoki represents part of a small and growing literature seeking to analyze the DBCFT, or at least one of its key components: a border tax adjustment on imports and exports. In reading the paper, one is reminded of the advantages of following the more standard tax reform approach of analyzing new proposals before voting on them. This is not to say that I agree with all the paper’s modeling assumptions or conclusions, because I do not. But without such concrete analysis, it is difficult to identify key points of professional disagreement and, more importantly, to try to resolve them. The paper analyzes the short-run macroeconomic effects of adopting border tax adjustments on their own, although this is not what was being proposed. However, this is equivalent in the model to analyzing adoption of a full DBCFT, that is, a “source-based” cash-flow tax—a tax on domestic producers’ cash flows—plus border adjustment that removes tax on exports and imposes tax on imports. This equivalence follows because in themodel, a cash-flow taxwithout border adjustment is anondistortionary tax on pure profits—a lump-sum tax that would then be rebated via an

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以 2017 年 12 月颁布的《减税和就业法案》而告终的税制改革过程遵循了一种不寻常的营业税改革模式。尤其是最初的提案，即共和党人于 2016 年 6 月在众议院提出的“蓝图”（Tax Reform Task Force 2016）要求采用一种在当时许多经济学界并不熟悉的方法。职业，一种基于目的地的现金流税（DBCFT）。DBCFT 将代表与当前政策的重大决裂，由于对其普遍缺乏了解，许多商界领袖、政策制定者和经济学家误解了其目标、特征和属性。Omar Barbiero、Emmanuel Farhi、Gita Gopinath 和 OlegItskhoki 的论文代表了寻求分析 DBCFT 的小型且不断增长的文献的一部分，或至少其关键组成部分之一：进出口边境税调整。在阅读这篇论文时，人们会想起遵循更标准的税收改革方法的优势，即在对新提案进行投票之前对其进行分析。这并不是说我同意论文的所有建模假设或结论，因为我不同意。但如果没有这样具体的分析，就很难找出专业分歧的关键点，更重要的是，很难试图解决这些分歧。该论文分析了自行采取边境税收调整的短期宏观经济影响，尽管这不是提议的内容。然而，这在模型中等同于分析采用完整 DBCFT，即，“基于来源的”现金流税——对国内生产商的现金流征税——加上边境调整，取消出口税和进口税。这种等价性是因为在模型中，没有边界调整的现金流税是对纯利润的非扭曲税——一种一次性税，然后通过