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Gosh. How did that happen? What an unfathomable mystery! Oh . . .

80 percent of Americans are getting a tax cut, but only 17 percent think they are



80 percent of Americans are getting a tax cut, but only 17 percent think they are Rob already told you this morning about the Democrats' plans to spend the entire year attacking the tax cut, on what I guess is the theory that people will be really pissed off not to hand over so much of the money they earned to politicians. But wait! The tax cut is unpopular! It polls terribly! Maybe the strategy can really work! One problem with that, and it's a pretty serious problem. The main reason the tax cut is unpopular is that most people are completely uninformed about what it consists of. To cut to the chase, hundreds of millions who are getting a tax cut think they're not. And where did they get that idea? I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count. Writing for the Atlantic, David A. Graham ponders the depths of this mystery:
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.”

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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?

I realize the media object to idea that they should parrot "Republican talking points," and I don't want them to do that either. But it's one thing to resist spewing talking points under the guise of news. It's another thing to withhold information about a proposed policy change because some of the information will reflect well on Republicans. It's your job to report the facts without fear or favor, not to worry about who will benefit when you do. The media and the Democrats have had success persuading much of the public that this tax cut is bad for them, mainly by making a lot of people who are getting tax cuts think they're not. So maybe they think they can keep riding those messages all the way to success in the November 2018 mid-terms. But here's the problem with that: When people you convinced were not getting tax cuts actually do, and see that reflected in their paychecks, they're going to know you lied to them. And when they get those bigger paychecks week after week, and they're going to be reminded that you lied to them ever as they're enjoying the financial benefits that come with keeping more of what you earn. The only way the media and the Democrats were able to make this tax cut unpopular was by lying to the public about what it really does. They hoped they could prevent it from passing by making it unpopular enough that a few wobbly Republicans would get nervous and kill it. That didn't work, and now the public is going to see what the tax cut really does, not what they were told it would do. Good luck convincing people they didn't get a tax cut when they see every week in their paychecks that they did.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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