Aaron and McGuire recently put forward a new method for imputing benefits of government expenditures on public goods for various income classes. They fail to present conclusive empirical results, however, lacking a parameter whose value is heretofore unmeasured. This note uses three independent empirical estimates of this crucial parameter to compute estimates of the net incidence of the fiscal system. For the U.S., 1961, it is found that benefits from public goods are regressively distributed. It is further suggested that the desire to equalize incomes requires provisions of less, not more, public goods.

For more than three decades, economic columnist Joseph A. Livingston has canvassed a panel of economists twice a year, eliciting their six-month and twelve-month forecasts for more than a dozen key variables. This study analyzes whether experts' predictions are unbiased, and whether complete use was made of all relevant, known information (unbiasedness and completeness being necessary conditions for fully rational expectations). Little bias was found in either half-year or full-year predictions, but extensive underutilization of information-particularly data on monetary growth-occurred. To prophecy is extremely difficult-especially with respect to future. Chinese proverb Do ECONOMISTS' EXPECTATIONS regarding key price and nonprice variables utilize all known, relevant information, in an unbiased, efficient manner? This is a worthy subject for research, for several reasons. Properties of experts' predictions likely form an upper bound for those of laymen. Further, as John Muth [14] has noted, the character of dynamic processes is typically very sensitive to way expectations are influenced by actual course of (p. 316); hence, we need to know precisely how events do affect expectations. Finally, common practice of replacing a variable's (generally unobserved) expectation with a proxy based on its past values will be unbiased (and will not cause bias in other