Suppose the government forces a company to take all the money it would have paid person A and use it to hire person B instead. How many jobs have been created? If you said, “One direct job, one indirect job, and a number of uncounted induced jobs,” call the University of Massachusetts, because you qualify to do economic analysis at their Political Economy Research Institute (PERI). The trick to the perverse PERI analysis is to ignore the cost of taking the money from person A and from the people who …
Several weeks ago we received a letter from Chairman Henry Waxman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee requesting information concerning our economic modeling of H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act. We quickly responded (our answers are available here). Several other organizations and government agencies also received the same request including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Energy Information Administration (EIA), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), CRA International, the American Council for Capital Formation (ACCF), and the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC). Notably missing from this list were …
A recent report by Robert Pollin, James Heintz and Heidi Garrett-Peltier of the Political Economy Research Institute purports to study the “economic transformation” the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) will harmoniously bring about. The analysis begins with the three “objectives that will define the entire enterprise” and concludes with the need “to promote an aggressive policy agenda now to defeat global warming.” This tips the reader to the fact that this is not an objective analysis. However, the suspension of …
