On December 11, The Washington Post published an article by Casey Mulligan and Tomas Philipson attacking Lawrence Summers’s statement that “thousands” of individuals would die if the Republican tax bill became law. Summers reached his estimate after carefully reviewing the literature and consulting with health economists Jonathan Gruber and Mulligan and Philipson’s University of Chicago colleague Dean Kate Baicker, who has published a number of influential studies on the effect of health insurance on health.

Sen. Susan Collins speaking on “Meet the Press” defended her vote on the Senate GOP tax bill based on the claims of the signatories to the nine economists' letter that we have criticized over the last week. The Maine Republican explained: “If you take the CBO’s formula and apply it, just four-tenths of one percent increase in the GDP generates revenues of a trillion dollars. ... So I think if we can stimulate the economy, create more jobs, that does generate more revenue.”

I suggested on Friday when it became clear that the tax bill would pass that “thousands would die.” In light of my sharp criticism of other economists' claims regarding the legislation, some have asked whether my statement is well grounded. I think it is, but this should be open to debate.

We appreciate that in response to our questions you clarified a number of points in your letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and, in particular, that you are backing off the statement in your original letter that “the gain in the long-run level of GDP would be just over 3%, or 0.3% per year for a decade.” As you state in your response to us, “We did not offer claims about the speed of adjustment to a long-run result.”

Until last month, there had been fewer cases of deal capitalism than I had feared. But in the last month, policy has taken an ugly turn toward the selective and ad hoc use of government power — not to reward political friends but to punish political adversaries. Government rewards encourage cronyism and rent-seeking and waste public resources. Targeting adversaries may chill dissent and threaten democracy.

Median pay growth has been abysmal over recent decades: It rose only 12 percent between 1973 and 2015 while productivity rose by 73 percent. This stark fact highlighted in Figure 1 has led some to ask the question: Does productivity growth still benefit typical American workers?

I have been very sharply critical of what I regard as unprofessional exaggeration by advocates of the Trump tax proposal. Reasonably enough, people have asked what I am for.

I strongly support tax reform in general and especially corporate tax reform on the model of the highly successful bipartisan 1986 tax reform, which achieved very large rate reductions, spurred economic growth and improved the efficiency of the economy while being revenue- and distribution-neutral.

I recently asserted that Kevin Hassett deserved a failing grade for his “analysis” projecting that the Trump administration proposal to reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent would raise the wages of an average American family between $4,000 to $9,000. I chose harsh language because Hassett had, for what seemed like political reasons, impugned the integrity of people like Len Burman and Gene Steuerle who have devoted their lives to honest rigorous evaluation of tax measures by calling their work “scientifically indefensible” and “fiction.” Since there have been a variety of comments on the economics of corporate tax reduction, some further discussion seems warranted.