Alvin Rabushka
David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow

Expertise: Taxation in the United States and abroad; economic development in the Pacific Rim countries, Israel, and the transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe, especially Russia

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Alvin Rabushka is the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution

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 economic development. His books include Politics in Plural Societies (originally published in 1972 and reissued in 2008 with a foreword and epilogue); A Theory of Racial Harmony; The Urban Elderly Poor; Old Folks at Home; The Tax Revolt; The Flat Tax; From Adam Smith to the Wealth of America; Hong Kong: A Study in Economic Freedom; and the New China. Rabushka’s most recent publication is Taxation in Colonial America.

With Michael S. Bernstam, he maintains the website www.Russianeconomy.org. In 1998, he published Fixing Russia's Banks: A Proposal for Growth (with Michael S. Bernstam). Together they are completing a longer study of the Russian economy titled From Predation to Prosperity: How to Move from Socialism to Markets.

Rabushka has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and in national newspapers. He has consulted for, and testified before, a number of congressional committees. In 1980, he served on President Ronald Reagan's Tax Policy Task Force.

Rabushka's books and articles on the flat tax (with Robert E. Hall) 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. 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, Georgia, Mongolia, Mauritius, Montenegro, Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, 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. In 2007, he was honored as a distinguished alumnus of the School of Arts and Sciences at Washington University.