Thanks for that contribution Dave. Your formulation of the burden of proof on those proposing major policy changes should become standard operating procedure. I'm going to save it and try to remember to pull it out on a regular basis in the future. Unfortunately, it seems that your simple logic is beyond our current political system. And I don't mean just the polticians. Take a peak at this piece of stuff n' nonsense that appeared as a USAToday op-ed. I would advise the author, since she presents herself as a card-carrying conservative, to peruse the WSJ occasionally. That publication is congenial for most conservatives, even those who find the mainstream economics profession too "liberal." The op-ed was transparently manufactured from talking points -- to say it was "written" would be an overly charitable characterization of the authoring process. The author is described as "a [former] fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation [and current] student at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government" who, I take it from the bits of personal bio woven into the narrative, is black. This is not a snark about affirmative action, I hasten to add. I was in the first class of HLS that was 10% women, so I know about the pre-affirmative action world and just how far we have come in three decades. But on the basis of this piece of evidence, admission standards for economic literacy in the highly competitive combined HLS/Kennedy School program have dramatically declined since I was there! I'm quite serious -- such a piece of flakery would have simply been unthinkable even a decade ago. I find the intellectual dishonesty of someone who would trot out those credentials to be a profoundly troubling symptom of the problems with what passes today for political discourse by "public intellectuals."