A few of these ideas are genuinely good. However, many of them are ill-advised and not well thought through and fail miserably the test of benefits exceeding costs. Often, it falls to the CEA to point out the flaws and derail these ideas.
This role of the CEA is wholly unheralded--after all, who hears about the idea that never came to fruition--but it serves as an important check in the policymaking process. As I mentioned, economic thinking at the CEA has been marked by important continuities.