So serious: so silly - inaccurate government statistics - Above the Beltway

Chief Executive, The, Jan-Feb, 1992 by Edwin J. Feulner

Detroit News economics analyst Warren Brookes has kept careful tabs of everything OMB has said about the deficit. In one 18-month period, Brookes noted, OMB's official five-year deficit forecast crept up from $62.3 billion to $1.09 trillion, a 1,644 percent increase! Yet, throughout 1991, with the economy stalled, senior White House officials and congressional leaders continued to defend the 1990 budget agreement. It wasn't until October that any real momentum for a tax cut appeared--and even then, some of the people most responsible for the budget fiasco insisted that a tax cut would harm more than help And, believe me, they had the numbers to "prove" it.

Of course, the numbers once again were bad. The reason: When assessing the effects of tax rates on government revenues, the Congressional Budget Office uses "static" economic models that assume individuals don't change their behavior in response to tax incentives. These same models were dead wrong when they predicted that the 1981 Reagan tax cut would cause higher inflation and slower economic growth, just as they were wrong to predict that tax revenues would increase if the top marginal rate was set at 100 percent. (I don't know about you, but a 100 percent tax rate would cause me to find a long stretch of beach where I could spend my days not worrying about anything except keeping the sun off the sand.)

FUN WITH NUMBERS

Skewing statistics is nothing new to the bureaucrats and pols who inhabit our nation's capitol. They are adept at twisting and perverting data for their own purposes. Anyone who has had the misfortune to read the studies, reports, and analyses that are put out every day by the hordes of committees, commissions, and agencies who are charged with formulating and recommending policy can attest to the fact that the entire process is mired in obfuscation. The cynics among us might even suspect that this is just the way that the bureaucrats and pols like it. There's really not much point in making things too clear. And of course they would never want to be so lax as to be up front with the folks back home about just what in the world is really going on in Washington. That would only lead to indignant letters and phone calls from outraged constituents who for some reason just don't appreciate the necessity of all the pork barrels, boondoggles, and other wacky capers that make a job in the upper echelons of the federal government more fun than a barrel of monkeys. Clearly, job security demands as many smoke screens and wild goose chases as the system can provide.

BUSINESS AS UN-USUAL

If any of you tried to run your businesses the way Washington runs this country, you'd either be standing in an unemployment line today or entertaining visitors at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. Literally, it can't be done. With all of the resources at Washington's disposal, it's absurd that it takes an outside watchdog such as Robert Rector to provide a thorough analysis of the Census Bureau data.