But does pressure to support Israel distort American decisions?

Most taxes distort economic decisions.

The current system, the report maintained, "also distorts corporate financial decisions - in particular by encouraging debt and discouraging new equity financing of corporate investments."

She said the law had distorted prosecutorial decisions because an independent prosecutor had unlimited time and money to investigate a single official, whereas career prosecutors are more restrained, in part because they must constantly balance competing cases and priorities.

The desire to protect a large budget and staff has a way of distorting decisions about new ventures, particularly in an organization that devoted better than two-thirds of its work to monitoring and studying a country, the Soviet Union, that no longer exists.

But as economists, they are all concerned with the same question: given that a government wants to raise a given amount of revenue, how can it raise it in a way that least distorts economic decisions?

Overhauling the system of civil lawsuits would remove from business a fear of being sued that distorts decisions on what types of products to develop, produce and sell.

Article 175 has inbuilt safeguards (in Article 176 EC) against unilateral trade distorting decisions that may be protectionist in nature rather than environmentally justifiable.

It impedes economic efficiency by distorting economic decisions.