By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--December 21, 2017
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Most Americans will save money under the tax bill that the Senate passed Tuesday night and the House passed Wednesday. The size of that benefit varies, but 80 percent of households will see some benefit in 2018. (The cuts shrink over time, eventually reduced to nothing for most people in 2027.) It’s not just that a plurality of respondents in a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll say the cuts are a bad idea (41-24, with 35 percent unsure or holding no opinion), or might have bad long-term effects. It’s that only 17 percent actually believe they’ll get a break. That result is in line with other polls that have shown similar skepticism about receiving any benefit. Republican leaders insist that once people start seeing the benefits, their views on the taxes will turn around. “If we can’t sell this to the American people then we should be in another line of work,” McConnell said early Wednesday morning. Whether or not that is true, the unpopularity of the cuts now is remarkable. Who doesn’t like free money? President Trump’s theory for unawareness about the impending tax cuts is unsurprising, since it’s his standard explanation for all of his travails. “The Tax Cuts are so large and so meaningful, and yet the Fake News is working overtime to follow the lead of their friends, the defeated Dems, and only demean,” Trump tweeted Wednesday morning. “This is truly a case where the results will speak for themselves, starting very soon. Jobs, Jobs, Jobs!” McConnell griped at reporters Tuesday night, “Your job is to use the Democrats’ talking points. I understand that.”
Coverage of the bill has been negative—Fareed Zakaria called it “possibly the worst piece of major legislation in a generation”—but while that can’t help, placing the blame entirely on the press overestimates its influence and ignores that portions of the bill are simply unpopular, and that’s after tens of millions of dollars in ad spending to boost its approval. The bill’s unpopularity might also be traced to anger about the fact that it undermines the newly popular Affordable Care Act, or awareness that its cuts will eventually expire, but that’s different from the strictly empirical whether it will reduce tax bills in the immediate term. Besides, the number of people directly affected by the changes to health care is small. A more likely factor is that many people don’t understand the bill very well. Compared to other legislation of similar scope, including previous changes to the tax code, this bill moved through Congress at a breakneck pace.Well there's a tautology if I've ever heard one. People don't understand the bill because they don't understand it. Graham tries to blame the Republicans themselves for pushing the bill through Congress too quickly and not giving people a chance to gain an understanding of it. This is how he hopes to let the media off the hook for their role in trashing it and promoting the lack of understanding. But that's a crock. How hard is it, when you're reporting on a proposed policy change, to explain clearly and accurately what the change is and how it will work? How hard is it to tell people their standard deductions are doubling? Or that their rates are falling? Or that their employers will pay less in taxes? And where did people get the idea that "the middle class is getting a tax hike" when that is objectively and factually false?
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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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