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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (45282)	8/26/2010 3:13:33 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71588

The actual results are not out there. Sure we can tell definitively what the debt levels are, and to as much accuracy as government economic statistics can get what the economy has done, but not the source for the different changes. There is no actual hard stat for the effects of tax cuts on the economy, either in general, or this specific one (or really two, since there where two laws). There is opinion, and there is analysis based on assumptions which are themselves opinions. Its the same way with Obama's "created and saved" job claims, except their even less well substantiated than any claim about the effect of the tax cut. (Partially because they are more recent, partially because there was less effort to nail it down, for example the CBO report just plugs in formulas that effectively assume the conclusion, while Obama doesn't even bother to do that much, and possibly partially because there was little or no net improvement in jobs as a result of the policy). The only real way to know is to run large sample, controlled repeated experiments that show a clear result. But of course you can't do that. We can't set up a ten thousand worlds with a ten thousand Americas and create 10 policies each of which get implemented by 1000 America's so we can see how each of them work, and then repeat the experiment later with different policies or with the same policies but different conditions. Macroeconomics isn't and pretty much can't be an experimental science. At the extremes, the results are so great and so clear that we can largely forgo the need for such controls. We can look at North and South Korea, and say that communism is bad for the economy despite the small sample and lack of controlling for other variables. But beyond such obvious cases, we have no useful experiments. No "actual results" for the question we are talking about (or no results that can be known, obviously the different policies did have some specific effect, we just can't be certain exactly what it was).