Education
Tang studied economy at the University of Amsterdam between 1985 and 1991, graduating cum laude.
Tang studied economy at the University of Amsterdam between 1985 and 1991, graduating cum laude.
Afterwords he worked as assistant at Tilburg University and as trainee researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Between 1995 and 2005 he was employee at the Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis. In 2001 he earned a doctorate in economic sciences from the University of Amsterdam.
He moved on to the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs where he was deputy director of General Economic Policies between September 2005 and March 2007.
House of Representatives
In the Netherlands general election of 2006 he was on the candidate list of the Labour Party. In the House he dealt with fiscal and financial policies.
Among them was the Icesave dispute and the role of the De Nederlandsche Bank in lieutenant In 2008 Tang was verbally reprimanded by President of the House of Representatives, Gerdi Verbeet, after speaking publicly about the then still secret Miljoenennota (Dutch government financial prospects).
In 2009 he leaked some of the financial prospect papers to RTL Nieuws.
The Labour Party took away his speaking rights on his topics in the House for one month. In 2010 Tang chose not to be reelectable in the next elections. European Parliament
In the May 2014 elections Tang was elected to the European Parliament.
Prior to being elected, in March 2014, Tang argued that top European Union officials should not earn more than ten times the wage of the lowest paid European Union employees.
He also argued that the European Union was impeding the economic growth of Europe, and argued for stricter supervision on banks in the European Union and for reforms in the sector. He also serves as vice-chair on the European Union-Serbia Stabilisation and Association Parliamentary Committee.
In the internal Labour Party elections he was chosen to be lijsttrekker (top party candidate) in the European Parliament elections of 2014, he won 52% of the votes.
Between 2007 and 2010 he had been member of the House of Representatives of the Netherlands. He was not directly elected, but after some Labour members of the House of Representatives move towards the cabinet Tang took up membership of the House. In the European Parliament he is member of the Committee on Budgets and the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs.