the Sugar Conspiracy

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Playing with numbers

Statistical expediency and fiscal obfuscation have become hallmarks of this White House. In the past three years, the Bush Administration has had the Bureau of Labor Statistics stop reporting mass layoffs. It shortened the traditional span of budget projections from ten years to five, which allowed it to hide the long-term costs of its tax cuts. It commissioned a report on the aging of the baby boomers, then quashed it because it projected deficits as far as the eye could see. The Administration declined to offer cost estimates or to budget money for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A recent report from the White House's Council of Economic Advisers included an unaccountably optimistic job-growth forecast, evidently guided by the Administration's desire to claim that it will have created jobs. And a few weeks ago the Treasury Department put civil servants to work'at Tom DeLay's request, evaluating a tax proposal identical to John Kerry's, then issued a press release saying that the proposal would raise taxes on "hardworking individuals."

Politics as usual? Not really. Hard as it may be to believe, in economic matters the executive branch has traditionally succeeded at hewing to the ideals of objectivity and nonpartisanship. Under Republicans and Democrats, in good times and bad, the Commerce Department and the Labor Department have produced reliable numbers, even when those numbers have made sitting Presidents look worse. Presidents have tried to put their spin on the data, of course, and there have been notable episodes of deliberate manipulation, as when Lyndon Johnson moved the Social Security Trust Fund into the general budget, or when David Stockman fabricated numbers in the first Reagan budget. On the whole, though, good economics has trumped politics.

Except in the current Administration.

posted by chris at 4:30 PM
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