Doing the Math on Bush's Tax Cut In all of Washington, there are three computer models built to produce what are called distributional tables � showing how any particular tax increase or tax cut would be distributed among various income levels. One model is at the Treasury Department, one is at Congress's Joint Tax Committee and one is at Citizens for Tax Justice, a research institute sponsored by labor unions. The methods are slightly different. But in the end, the analyses differ only at the margins. In the past, Democrats ran either the Treasury Department or the Joint Tax Committee � depending on which party controlled the White House and which controlled Congress � and whenever a tax proposal was made, the computer the Democrats were in charge of would instantly produce a distributional table. But Republicans have never liked that kind of measurement, saying it contributed to class warfare. So this year, with Republicans in charge of the White House and both houses of Congress for the first time in almost 50 years, neither the Treasury nor Congress has provided distributional tables on President Bush's tax plan. � Tax analysts from both parties who have worked at the Congressional Joint Tax Committee and the Office of Tax Analysis in the Treasury say the relevant information on how the Bush plan would affect people with different incomes is already in the computers. All it would take to produce the distributional tables would be for someone to push a button, the analysts said. But that may not happen. At a press briefing on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill said that figuring out what the tax benefits of the president plan would be at various income levels resulted only in "a nonsense set of statistics." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/politics/04CONG.html?pagewanted=all