Democrats have politicized a Congressional Research Service (CRS) paper on taxes to use it as a weapon against Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, according to a
Wall Street Journal editorial.
The paper, written by Obama donor and former Clinton White House official Thomas Hungerford, claims that 65 years of changes in "top tax rates have had little association with saving, investment or productivity growth."
The report came out in September and was picked up by liberal media and used in a speech by New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer to attack tax reform.
Republicans contested the study, noting that “multiple peer-reviewed studies that have found a significant relationship between cuts in tax rates and the pace of capital formation, investment and economic growth,” the editorial states.
CRS officials then took the study off the group’s web site. CRS deputy director Colleen Shogan wrote in an e-mail to a Republican Senate staffer that she gave Hungerford's manager "a list of concerns I would want addressed in a future version. . . . In particular, I want a better, more robust defense of the methodology in the paper."
Now Democrats are on the offensive, “trying to portray Mr. Hungerford as a victim of censorship due to GOP pressure,” the editorial states. “And Thursday they got an impressionable Jimmy Olson at the New York Times to buy the spin.” An article about the brouhaha appears on the front page of The Times business section Friday.
“This episode is nonetheless a significant blot on the CRS reputation for unbiased research,” The Journal editors write.
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