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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (44313)	8/7/2003 3:27:53 AM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50167

A few questions... Krugman's latest: Here's the story: Treasury has an elaborate computer model designed to evaluate who benefits and who loses from any proposed change in tax laws. For example, the model can be used to estimate how much families in the middle of the income distribution will gain from a tax cut, or the share of that tax cut that goes to the top 1 percent of families. In the 1990's the results of such analyses were routinely made public. But since George W. Bush came into power, the department has suppressed most of that information, releasing only partial, misleading tables. The purpose of this suppression, of course, is to conceal the extent to which Mr. Bush's tax cuts concentrate their bounty on families with very high incomes. In a stinging recent article in Tax Notes, the veteran tax analyst Martin Sullivan writes of the debate over the 2001 cut that 'Treasury's analysis was so embarrassingly poor and so biased, we thought we had seen the last of its kind.' What we'd like to know is (a) exactly which "elaborate computer model" is Paul talking about? Who wrote it? When was it written and for what purpose? What have its critics said? Has it been published? Aren't similar models being used in universities and research facilities around the country? What do they say? Can editorials be completely free of the basic newspaper ethos: "who, what, where, when, and why important?" This entire editorial is based on a false and misleading premise -- that there exists a Washington-based "elaborate computer models" monopoly. It accuses professional economists, with whom Paul has an intellectual disagreement, of unethical behavior. At one and the same time, by cheaply taking advantage of readers' ignorance of economics, it discards the basic ethics of journalism . Oh yeah, and by the way, regarding Paul Krugman's recent loud denials that the recovery is for real, here's how one of those "elaborate computer models" plots recent and forecast real gross domestic product. Go to economopundit.com