The End of Welfare as We Don't Know It

Brad De Long delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU
Mon Oct 12 19:21:25 PDT 1998


Re: Tresy Kilbourne <tresyk at halcyon.com>
>
>>Brad De Long writes:
>
>>Barlett and Steele are *extremely* unreliable. Use their numbers and
>>anecdotes and you may well wind up with a lot of egg on your face...
>Proof by assertion. Very impressive.
>
>

I'm not making an assertion, I'm giving you a warning:

Look. I got burned using them twice--and then had to apologize to the guys I had been debating, who now think I'm an idiot.

Then I realized that they were the kind of people who would--out of the four years that Bush was President--choose to tell their readers about the year in which (a) their income was high because of royalties from _Millie's Book_, but (b) their taxes were more-or-less normal because they'd given the royalties away (and hence taken a deduction) *because* that year showed a much lower tax rate for the rich Bushes than the surrounding years.

WARNING: if you use them as a source of information without checking their assertions, then you run a substantial risk of humiliating yourself...

Brad DeLong



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