Dynamic, but for whom?

Scripps Howard News Service: President Bush is asking Congress for $513,000 to set up something called the Dynamic Analysis Division within the Treasury, the idea being to predict the effects of tax proposals on the performance of the economy as a whole.
Normally, this would be of interest only to tax-policy wonks, but this administration has an unfortunate history of reaching conclusions and then casting around for evidence to support them. Perhaps it's unfair, but this division looks like a way of ginning up rationales for the president's tax cuts. This administration has played fast and loose with numbers before. Recall the deliberate underestimate of the cost of the prescription-drug benefit.
The intractable annual federal deficits and the mounting national debt have made tax cuts a hard sell in Congress.
No pain pitch
But the administration is pitching the idea that tax cuts do not reduce revenues but actually increase them by spurring economic growth.
Tax cuts are desirable ends in themselves -- when the nation doesn't have to borrow the money to make up for them. And the administration's own economists, like most economists, do not subscribe to the notion that tax cuts can recover their lost revenues through economic growth.
In itself, there's nothing wrong with dynamic analysis, or its more robust sibling, dynamic scoring, but it involves complicated economic models and assumptions not universally agreed on.
If the Treasury's dynamic analyses were transparent and open to scrutiny by the Congressional Budget Office, Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation and the capital's numerous economic think tanks, they might indeed have some predictive value. But the administration's penchant for secrecy makes that open to question.
Congress should regard this proposal with skepticism and even suspicion.