At this event, Alan Viard will present the X tax proposal while James Mackie of the U.S. Department of the Treasury and Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute will offer commentary.

This book by Alan Viard and Robert Carroll proposes to completely replace the income tax system with a progressive consumption tax.

Alan D. Viard, a resident scholar at AEI, reviews the budget outlook, the need for tax reform and the benefits of moving to a progressive consumption tax. He also discusses his forthcoming book, Progressive Consumption Taxation: The X Tax Revisited, which he coauthored with Robert Carroll of Ernst & Young. The book will be published by AEI Press in the Spring.

Austerity measures in Europe have been the topic of a heated and mostly confused debate in the economic world. During the May summit of the leading industrial nations at Camp David, German chancellor Angela Merkel and other European leaders pushed for continued European austerity. Keynesian critics argue that these policies destroy economic growth.

Two months ago, the House adopted a budget resolution that outlines the Republican majority's ambitious plans to slow the growth of federal entitlement spending. If implemented properly, entitlement spending restraint can address the long-term fiscal imbalance in a way that promotes economic growth and freedom.

The time may finally have come for the elimination of income tax and the adoption of a consumption tax.

The tax code is 5,296 pages long and full of complicated details. We outlined a few of them in our recent column for the New York Times Magazine. So why hasn't Congress done anything to simplify the tax code? We posed the question to Alan D. Viard, a tax expert at the American Enterprise Institute. His response is below.

Ominously labeled "Taxmageddon," a host of tax policy changes are set to occur at year-end, and there truly is much at stake: $3.67 trillion of additional tax revenue over 10 years from the Bush tax cuts alone.