Fun with Numbers. Representative Dick Armey (R., Tex.), one of the leaders on the Republican tax pledge last year, seemed an unlikely candidate for a promotion so long as Bob Michel remained minority leader. Indeed, Mr. Armey did not get the slot on the Rules Committee he coveted, but he was made the ranking Republican on the Joint Economic Committee, Congress’s equivalent of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors.
This puts Mr. Armey in a position to challenge the biased figures—especially the static analysis that takes no account of the incentive effects on revenue of supply-side tax cuts—of bodies such as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Indeed, in a recent rules package, House Democrats tried to cheat on the budget-summit agreement by removing the task of estimating expenditures and revenues from the Office of Management and Budget, under the President’s control, and giving it to the CBO, which marches to Democratic drums. Armey’s first shot across the Democrats’ bows came when he challenged the accuracy of the Green Book, the income- and taxdistribution tables put out each year by the House Ways and Means Committee. In these tables, as columnist Warren Brookes notes, income from capital gains is not adjusted for inflation, thus showing more income disparity than really exists. Nice to see Republicans taking on the rules of the game again.
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