Michael Lewis last week wrote an interesting and entertaining piece on the occupational hazard of a Wall Street career. If you have not seen it, it is here.

Lewis points out that Wall Street, while eager to disrupt other industries, is not so pleased to be disrupted itself. In particular, he suggests that Wall Street is fighting a new kind of stock market, IEX, that would make the stock market more effective and efficient, but less lucrative for Wall Street banks.

So what do think tanks have to say on this? Are they taking sides on the issue? Find Policy shows that the issue is not yet mainstream there, with only three results.

Yet the piece it finds is useful, with a lively debate in the comments. To try this search yourself, head over here.

ProPublica, an investigative outfit in the United States, reports that a company producing tax-filing software has been active in trying to influence policy. The software company allegedly has used proxies to argue against a simpler system for filing taxes. Such a simplification would reduce the need for tax-filing software. It appears that the public relations firm working for the software maker had citizens reach out to lawmakers, with strikingly similar letters. Below is the story.

If you are interested in policy, you may now well wonder whether any think tanks got involved. Here is where Find Policy comes in: type in the name of the software maker in the Public Policy search page, and you can see what think tanks tell us on this issue.

A first glance suggests that think tanks across the spectrum were onto the issue. The New America Foundation highlighted corporate lobbying against simpler filing a few years ago, drawing on a local newspaper.

Similarly, CATO and AEI highlighted the issue.

It's a different political perspective, but they highlight that there are vested interests in keeping things complicated. As think tanks are becoming more transparent, it will be easier in the future to track contributions across think tanks in a single search as well. Faster and more focused, Find Policy makes it easy for you to see what the world's leading think tanks are up to.

Go straight to the Public Policy search page here.

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