Blasts from the past for critiques of BHI that don't last.

 
Another day, another reason for a handy compendium of response to "critiques" of BHI's work (and an note on argumentation.)

Update: Keynesian v. Classical Methods in Modeling State Tax Policy (November 2013)
 
Response to Rep. Hunter (March 2014)

An Appeal to Facts in a “Fact Check”:  Response to Critique of BHI's Renewable Portfolio Standards studies (November 2013)

Response to the Union of Concerned Scientists' "Critique" of BHI's RPS studies (January 2013)

BHI’s response to TP’s Climate Progress blogger Michael Conathan’s critique of NJ wind farm study (August 2011)

The Beacon Hill Institute’s Tax Analysis Modeling Program: A Response to Charney (April 2010)

The Beacon Hill Instituteʹs Analysis of Pennsylvania Tax Policy: STAMPing Out the Nonsense from Our Critics (July 2009)

Information about the BHI State Tax Analysis Modeling Program (October 2012, rev)

A brief primer on the motive fallacy. 

WSJ's Notable & Quotable for today nails the data problem with prevailing wages

From today's Wall Street Journal (gated)

Philip K. Howard, from his new book "The Rule of Nobody: Saving America From Dead Laws and Broken Government" (Norton, 2014):
 The 2009 economic stimulus package promoted by President Obama included $5 billion to weatherize some 607,000 homes-with the goals of both spurring the economy and increasing energy efficiency. But the project was required to comply with a statute called the Davis-Bacon Act (signed into law by President Hoover in 1931), which provides that construction projects with federal funding must pay workers the "prevailing wage"-basically a union perk that costs taxpayers about 20 percent more than actual labor rates. This requirement comes with a mass of red tape; bureaucrats in the Labor Department must set wages, as a matter of law, for each category of construction worker in each of three thousand counties in America. There was no schedule for "weatherproofers." So the Labor Department began a slow trudge of determining how much weatherproofers should be paid in Merced County, California; Monmouth County, New Jersey; and several thousand other counties. The stimulus plan had projected that California would weatherproof twenty-five hundred homes per month. At the end of 2009, the actual total was twelve.
 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303725404579461330128654314?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303725404579461330128654314.html

For more on the prevailing wage, see BHI's 2008 study.

David G. Tuerck interviewed by Massachusetts Matters on the recent UAW vote in Tennessee.