The economists and statisticians who built and run the Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM) must be doing something right because their work is a major irritant to a White House intent on rushing trillions of dollars in new spending through Congress. The president’s chief of staff is said to have dismissed the academic center’s estimates of the Build Back Better (BBB) agenda as tainted by ideology, and a press aid recently claimed the model’s output was “wrong on the math.” Of course, it is this kind of baseless criticism that is transparently political, not the PWBM.
The PWBM is a nonpartisan initiative of the University of Pennsylvania and is directed by Kent Smetters, a tax official in the Department of the Treasury during the George W. Bush administration with a doctorate in economics from Harvard. He works with an expert staff of qualified analysts and reports to a roster of well-respected internal and external advisors on the model’s design and assumptions. All of this information, along with the PWBM cost estimates, are accessible online at the initiative’s website, as is a list of its financial supporters.
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