Matthew Gardner
Senior Fellow
Areas of Expertise
Economic modeling federal tax policy state tax policy corporate taxesMatt is a senior fellow at ITEP where he has worked since 1998. He previously served as ITEP’s executive director from 2006 to 2016. Mr. Gardner’s work focuses on federal, state and local tax systems, with a particular emphasis on the impact of tax policies on low- and moderate-income tax payers. He uses ITEP’s microsimulation model to produce economic projections and analyses on the effects of current and proposed federal and state tax and budget policies.
Matt is a noted corporate tax expert and the primary author of ITEP’s regular corporate studies on the tax habits of Fortune 500 corporations (most recently, The 35 Percent Corporate Tax Myth) as well as publications on international corporate tax avoidance. He regularly examines corporate financial filings and writes briefs, blogs and reports on trends in corporate tax avoidance. He monitors and researches federal tax policies and writes about their impact on tax fairness and sustainability, and he is often called on to speak publicly about corporate tax issues and federal and state tax policies.
Matt’s earlier work for ITEP focused on state policy. He is an author of Who Pays: A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All 50 States (2003, 2009, 2013, and 2015 editions). He has conducted tax analyses for state and local policymakers and advocates in more than 45 states. Matt has degrees from the University of Maryland and the University of Rochester. He resides in Washington, D.C. and originally hails from Raleigh, N.C.
mattg @ itep.orgRecent Publications and Posts view more
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Apple’s Three-Month Tax Savings under President Trump’s New Tax Law: $1.68 Billion
By now, it should come as no shock that profitable Fortune 500 corporations are reaping huge benefits from the corporate tax cuts enacted last December. But as first quarter earnings reports are released, we’re learning just how big.
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15 Companies Report Tax Savings of $6.2 Billion in First Three Months of 2018
In reports released over the past week, covering the first three months of 2018, a few of the biggest and most profitable Fortune 500 corporations acknowledge receiving billions in tax cuts in the first quarter of 2018 alone. Fifteen of these companies collectively disclosed reducing their effective tax rates by $6.2 billion compared to the rates they faced in the first quarter of last year.
Media Mentions view more
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The New Yorker: If Jeff Bezos Makes Washington the Second Headquarters of Amazon
Earlier this year, Seattle’s city council passed a tax on large corporations aimed at raising an estimated forty-seven million dollars a year for affordable-housing initiatives. But after about a month the city council repealed the tax—in response to a ballot challenge funded in part by Amazon, which threatened to leave Seattle if the tax was implemented. Matthew Gardner, a tax-policy analyst at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, told the Washington Post, “Nobody on Seattle’s city council wants to be the one who chased Amazon out of town.”
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The Real News Network: How Dismantling an Obscure Tax Created an American Aristocracy
Republicans’ decades-long efforts to gut the estate tax is creating a permanent ultra-rich class, and undermining the government’s ability to pay for popular programs like Social Security and Medicare.