Tax and Spin : A think tank and its "genius." - Center for Budget and Policy Priorities head Robert Greenstein

'He really is incredibly influential," says Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute (and NR). "I would say he's one of the top five liberals in America." Moore isn't talking about Ted Turner or Barney Frank. He's talking about a man familiar only to the most strung-out of political junkies: Robert Greenstein, head of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Moore adds, "I've been in meetings with Democratic congressmen where they say, 'What would Greenstein say?'" about some proposal.

Greenstein, director of the food-stamp program under President Carter and winner of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, is an unlikely powerbroker. His think tank is known for publishing up-to-the-minute, thorough analyses of proposed budget cuts and welfare changes and their effects on poor people. Robert Borosage, co-director of the (left-wing) Campaign for America's Future, explains: "They are more in the policy debate than academic organizations, and they are more academic than political organizations, so their analysis has a repute and a weight that is not normally achieved by political organizations, and at the same time they turn out reports at the pace of the political debate."

In a capital where spuriously precise predictions are regularly used as political weapons, numbers provide authority. In a government as large and unwieldy as ours, so does an understanding of policy minutiae. Even Greenstein's adversaries respect his command of those. Conservative welfare expert Robert Rector, who has sparred with him over the years, points out that Greenstein's forte is to win some obscure policy change that, while others nod, raises welfare benefits and gets more people on the rolls. P. J. O'Rourke calls it the "tyranny of boredom": The last one left awake gets to spend all the money.

The trouble is that all of those minutiae don't add up to wisdom. The Center, along with Marian Wright Edelman's Children's Defense Fund, may have brought statistical rigor to the welfare debate. (Mrs. Edelman sits on the Center's board.) But those statistics were deployed in a reactionary defense of a welfare system that was ever more clearly failing. With little to say about the collapse of marriage in the inner city, both outfits became marginalized as paleoliberals. They couldn't see the forest fire for the trees.

Their position having become untenable, President Clinton abandoned it by signing welfare reform. There were a few ineffectual resignations in protest from his administration: Mrs. Edelman's husband, Peter, left; Wendell Primus, who had cranked out studies from the Health and Human Services Department predicting that reform would push a million children into poverty, went to-the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

Greenstein denies that he is a knee-jerk liberal, noting that he favors paying down the federal debt over new spending and also favors some entitlement reforms. "This is not the typical view among liberal nonprofits in Washington," he says with a quiet chuckle. But this just shows he's a liberal who's smart enough to see that the growing entitlements might squeeze his cherished antipoverty programs out of the budget. And while Greenstein says that he could be for tax cuts in the right circumstances, somehow those circumstances never line up.

The Center objects to the proposed Republican tax cuts, he says, because of their cost and, secondarily, their unfairness. Its ally in this fight, Citizens for Tax Justice, focuses more narrowly on the latter issue. It also dispenses with the Center's sober just-the-facts approach in favor of sarcastic partisan digs and brazen statistical sleight of hand. The Center is, nonetheless, perfectly willing to cite the other group's "research" and relies on its economic models to show that Republican bills favor the rich. Republicans detest this argument, which they call "class warfare," but the press laps it up. David Rosenbaum reported in the New York Times that "Citizens for Tax Justice, an organization sponsored by labor unions that usually makes reliable calculations, figured that nearly half of the tax reduction from the rate cuts alone would go to the wealthiest 10 percent of taxpayers, those with incomes above $89,000."

But there are so many contested assumptions, reasonable disagreements, and uncertainties that "reliable" is almost meaningless in this context. In addition, both Citizens for Tax Justice and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities stack the deck against tax cuts. Here are a few of the ways they do it:

1) Treat single people as "families." The poorer the middle class looks, the more Republican tax cuts will seem to favor the rich. So in its analysis of the Senate tax bill, the Center lowballs its benefits to a middle-class family of four by claiming that the median family income is $37,000-when that's actually the median household income, a measure that includes single people. The median income for families is $45,000 and for two-income families, $52,000.