This is a periodic newsletter of the interesting things we’ve seen and what we are thinking about in open source policy analysis.

Tax-Brain and Tax-Calculator inform the state and local tax (SALT) deduction debate. This week, the House of Representatives is expected to vote on a bill to temporarily lift the cap on the SALT deduction while increasing the top marginal tax rate from 37 percent to 39.6 percent. Using Tax-Brain* and Tax-Calculator* to analyze the distributional effects of the bill, Tyler Evilsizer (Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget) and Donald Schneider (former Ways and Means chief economist) post their results on Twitter. Link and link

Revisiting the Green New Deal with Tax-Calculator. In “Rethinking the Green New Deal: Using Climate Policy to Address Inequality,” AEI’s Aparna Mathur explores policy proposals to better accomplish some of the stated goals of the Green New Deal. Mathur uses Tax-Calculator* to evaluate the revenue and distributional impacts of supplementing a carbon tax with individual income tax proposals, including adjusted tax rates and brackets and expansion of the earned income tax credit and child tax credit, as a means to reduce economic inequality. Link

Open-source algorithm for better MRIs. Last week, NYU Langone Health and Facebook AI’s collaboration, fastMRI, open sourced hundreds of thousands of MRI images. These images, which were used to train the fastMRI algorithm, will help researchers generate MRIs up to ten times faster, resulting in reduced costs, greater accuracy, and increased accessibility. Link

Visualizing the global environment. The UN Biodiversity Lab is an open-source platform that allows policymakers and other users to visualize a wide array of environmental measures, including biodiversity, climate, and restoration, across the world. Users can explore the preloaded data, upload their own data, and compare the current state of the environment with the goals laid out during the Convention on Biological Diversity and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Link

* These projects are attendees or graduates of OSPC’s incubator program.

Edited by Matt Jensen and Peter Metz