The author of a new nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) report concluding that tax cuts for upper-income earners in America don’t spur economic growth is a frequent donor to the Democrat Party and President Barack Obama, political donation records show.

Thomas Hungerford authored “Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945″ for CRS. The report, published Sept. 14, came to a conclusion that supports Obama’s tax policy.

Hungerford’s LinkedIn profile shows he has worked at CRS since 2005. In 2008, political donation records published by the Center for Responsive Politics show Hungerford donated $3,500 to Obama’s campaign. He gave the president another $500 in August 2012. Since 2009, Hungerford has also donated $2,450 to Democrat Party organizations such as the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democrat National Committee and the Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee.

In October 2000, when he worked as an economist for the Social Security Administration, Hungerford donated $500 to Democrat presidential candidate Vice President Al Gore.

The CRS is billed as a nonpartisan arbiter of facts and, like the Congressional Budget Office and Government Accountability Office, exists to help members of Congress understand issues. When it writes and issues a report, it does so at the request of a member of Congress. Unless that member says publicly that he or she asked for such a report, the identity of the member or members requesting it remains confidential. CRS reports are not automatically disseminated to the public, either.

In an email to The Daily Caller, CRS spokeswoman Janine D’Addario said that the agency “provides non-partisan, objective analysis to Congress...At CRS, employees’ personal political views or previous employment are not permitted to influence their non-partisan work for Congress”...

In a follow-up phone interview, D’Addario told TheDC that this report -- like all CRS reports -- went through a lengthy review process...

The report concluded, “The results of the analysis suggest that changes over the past 65 years in the top marginal tax rate and the top capital gains tax rate do not appear correlated with economic growth.”

“The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment, and productivity growth,” the report continued. “The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie.”

It also argues that “the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution.”

The conservative Heritage Foundation argued that the CRS report “failed” in its logic.

“In fact, these stylistic correlations prove nothing,” Curtis Dubay wrote for Heritage’s Foundry blog. “In short, the economy is more complicated than this simplistic approach can acknowledge. For the analysis to prove anything, it needed to account for countless other economic and policy factors, many specific to a given period, and determine how those factors influenced economic growth in the period in question. With this as background, the analysis would then have to isolate the effect lower rates had on growth.”

Dubay argued that CRS is normally “admirably and diligently” objective in their analyses, but that “the longstanding episodic exception has been in tax policy.”

CRS reports are only distributed to members of Congress and their staffers, who can choose to distribute them to the press, as occurred with this report.

After the report’s release, The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, CNBC and BusinessWeek, among other media outlets, ran headlines touting the report. The liberal Huffington Post ran a headline that said tax cuts “linked to income inequality, not economic growth.”

Liberal advocacy organization ThinkProgress -- the media arm of progressive Center for American Progress -- claimed victory too...

D’Addario said she doesn’t think the CRS owes any public explanation about the author’s Democrat involvement, since her agency serves Congress exclusively.

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