What Is the Tax Policy Center Trying to Do? And How Best to Do It?
Howard Gleckman:
TaxVox: the Tax Policy Center blog :: Brad DeLong’s Modest Proposal: In his blog today, Brad DeLong argued that TPC had been less influential over the past decade than the liberal Democratic think tank Center for American Progress. Brad's theory is that organizations such as TPC, the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, and the Center for Budget & Policy Priorities have, essentially, been too wimpy to be effective. DeLong thus joins the camp of Paul Krugman (and Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and Newt Gingrich) in arguing that life in the middle-of-the-road makes you roadkill.
Brad knows his economics very well. Public policy, not so much.... Brad fundamentally misunderstands what we do.... Figuring out what good policies are is exactly what we try to do. And I’m glad he thinks we succeed. But we don’t... build coalitions of any kind... We don’t play Noah, bringing pols two-by-two onto our policy ark. We, in fact, have no policy ark....
We gather and analyze data, present it in useful ways and without partisan spin, and tell politicians and the public about the likely consequences of tax policy....
We are proudly non-partisan.... Our reputation for nonpartisanship is critical to what we do. It is why people across the political spectrum acknowledge our estimates are credible even as they sometimes grumble about what the results imply for their own policy views. If we lose that credibility by turning ourselves into DeLongian partisans, the data lose much of their value.
Our non-partisanship is what makes TPC so different from an outfit like the Center for American Progress, or the Heritage Foundation.... Is partisan more effective than non-partisan? I’m not so sure. Has CAP changed the policy agenda in a big way? Call me after health reform.
Criticizing TPC for trying to build centrist coalitions for middle-of-the-road ideas is like panning Bruce Springsteen for not being able to hit a curveball. It ain’t even our game.
Nevertheless, and as Howard knows very well, conservative Republicans who disagree with TPC analyses--well, not "disagree with analyses," but rather wish such non-partisan analyses did not exist--dismiss TPC as a liberal think tank, but liberal Democrats who would rather TPC analyses not exist never dismiss TPC as a conservative think tank. I think that means that what used to be the bipartisan--or perhaps the non-partisan--sensible, pragmatic, technocratic, public-spirited center is now exclusively found on the Democratic side of the aisle.
TPC analyses may well lead senators like Nelson and Lincoln and Bayh to vote against their party's leaderhip if TPC numbers suggest that what is proposed is a bad idea. It is impossible to envision TPC analyses leading senators like Domenici and Grassley and Hatch to do the same.
That is an asymmetry worth thinking about.
