By BRUCE HALLETT PRESIDENT

OVER THE PAST 25 YEARS, TIME has periodically convened a group of the most interesting and knowledgeable people we could find to talk about the state of the U.S. economy. These symposia, which we now organize about once a year, have provided our journalists (and, by extension, our readers) with something of a checkup on the nation's economic health--a chance to take its temperature, gauge its pulse and draw a few conclusions about where it might be headed. In the past, we have selected our panelists from among the country's top economic experts (four previous participants have also served as chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers). This year, however, we decided to try something new.

For the session in our Washington bureau, we invited some mainstream economists, of course, including David Wyss of DRI/McGraw Hill and Allen Sinai of Lehman Brothers Global Economics. But we also added a U.S. Senator (Pete Domenici), one of Clinton's top economic advisers (Laura D'Andrea Tyson), a Cabinet member (Labor Secretary Robert Reich), a specialist on minority economics (Margaret Simms of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies), a conservative economist (Stephen Moore from the Cato Institute) and a New Democrat (Rob Shapiro of the Progressive Policy Institute).

We hoped this rich intellectual mix would stimulate some spirited debate, and we were not disappointed. Washington is in the throes of a bitter political and philosophical battle over the budget, and our participants could not help but carry some of the heat from that conflict into the Time symposium. Their discussion, which is reflected in our story in this week's issue, offered a telling preview of the issues likely to emerge when the 1996 election season kicks off next month.

At one point, a particularly testy exchange flared up after Domenici and Tyson got into what senior economics reporter Bernard Baumohl called a "gloves-off discussion over Medicare and Medicaid cuts." When Tyson interrupted Domenici, the New Mexico Senator snapped, "I did not interrupt you, and you spoke for 14 minutes!" The tension subsided only after Sinai took the opportunity to remind his fellow panelists that in economics, discourse and disagreement often go hand in hand. "If we laid all the economists from end to end," he said, "they would not reach the same conclusion." That was one point on which even Tyson and Domenici could agree.