On a proposed cut in the corporate income tax.
President Trump is pursuing a drastic cut in the corporate tax rate, a move that is likely to grow the national debt and breach a long-held Republican goal of curbing federal borrowing.
That is the main theme of the story. This would be fine with me if the Post were always so fastidious about editorializing about the deficit effect of policies. For example, they could report Mr. Trump’s budget cuts as moves that are likely to shrink the debt and help curb federal borrowing. Or they could describe Democrats’ spending proposals as likely to grow the national debt.
Or they could not do any front-page editorializing and instead use the opinion page to express their concerns.
The irony of this is that for people like me, this shifts the focus away from President Trump’s flaws and keeps the attention on the Post’s flaws. The less even-handed they are, the more sympathy I have for Mr. Trump. Of course, their more typical Trump-hating readers are thrilled to see them attack President Trump at every opportunity.
Related:
Jack Shafer and Tucker Doherty write,
The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political. If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a pro-Clinton county—odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro-Clinton counties. And you’ve got company: If you’re a typical reader of Politico, chances are you’re a citizen of bubbleville, too.
I recommend the entire essay.
Wow, who knew that the Orwellian behavior of the media was due to propinquity? If only there was some technology out there that allowed like-minded individuals to communicate and coordinate over long distances…
Injection of editorializing (or marketing for that matter) into content that is presented as straight news is an age old problem. I don’t see how conflating that issue with discussions of bubbles or bias is very helpful.
The bubble analysis seems bizarre to me. If you have two very large population groups with divergent political orientations, and one publishes like crazy, and meets a vigorous demand for content, and the other doesn’t, which side is in the bubble?
My fear is that it is part of the process. We are witnessing Arnold being polarized. And if Arnold can be polarized then there is no hope for anyone else. And how does democracy work if the two-party system makes media lie and makes everyone believe the lies?
As to your bubble paragraph, here is my theory: It will take a minute. First, an observation. Question: What is the most liberal media outlet IN SPITE OF ITSELF. Answer: NPR.
NPR should not be the most liberal, because they are national. They should have an absolutely equality of range of opinion. And yet, it clearly is (aside from the artificially synthetic MSNBC, obviously, which is ultra-liberal by synthetic design).
It is the fact that they are national, that causes them to be liberal. Conservatives are more likely to have localized and specialized views that inform their politics. Their national level views are fairly limited to nationalism. Liberals tend to address local and specialized problems from a state/national scale. Thus they dominate BROADcasting.
OK, let’s say your theory is correct.
That describes one political orientation that is more predisposed to express its views to a wider audience than the other. I think we can agree that happens. That doesn’t describe a bubble.
Using the term “bubble” is to accuse someone of being insular, of not listening. You are not describing the middle of the country as being ignored. You are describing them as not being as interested in speaking up on national issues.
No, what I’m saying is that they don’t think things like baking wedding cakes are national issues.
I think you are in the bubble!
@Andrew
We were discussing whether coastal media organizations were in a bubble or not.
Your wedding cake example is a good example of bubble thinking. You could say you don’t think things like baking wedding cakes are national issues. You could also say you don’t think things like drinking fountains are national issues.
Or, you could say, because that cake is offered for sale by a retail business open to the public, that “…all persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, and privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation”. You know, like in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
You still don’t get my point. Of course I understand the progressive angle.
I don’t think they understand my angle…at all. They can’t even fathom that it exists.
Thus, the bubble.
The closest they ever get to my angle is to assume I’m homophobic!
The WAPO editorial board has obsessed over deficits for a long, long time, spanning admins of both parties.
Dean Baker at Beat the Press has been attacking them for this for more than a decade.
It is what they do.
EMichael, I agree that the editorial page has consistently called attention to deficits. The front page has not.
“The Washington Post (a.k.a. Fox on 15th) feels so strongly that we should reduce the budget deficit that they ran yet another front page editorial on the topic. The piece told readers in the second paragraph:
“This mounting government debt poses a painful choice for developed countries such as Britain, Japan and the United States: either a deep reordering of public expectations about everything from the retirement age to tax rates, or slower growth as record levels of borrowing crimp economic activity.”
http://prospect.org/article/another-front-page-editorial-washington-post
There are many more, Arnold.
I am sorry, but I do not see how this article proves your point. *My* point is that the Post writes front-page editorial pieces opposing tax cuts on deficit grounds but does not run such front-page editorials opposing Democratic spending programs on deficit grounds.
If you think it’s wrong to run any story suggesting that our fiscal policy is unsustainable (which would mean that they could never run a story on CBO projections), then you can have that opinion. It does not change mine.
They routinely complain about entitlements. As far as other Democratic spending, that is paid for or more, lowering projections, even if focused on the ten year window like all CBO projections. You may be objecting to stimulus during recessions, but there is bipartisan support for that.
I would disagree that WaPo routinely complains about entitlement spending in any meaningful way.
This is a big problem in the media, especially on the left but also on the right. Even among people who consider themselves fairly left of center, ‘entitlement reform’ as a vague concept is quite popular. However, suggest cutting any major specific entitlement, Medicare, Medicaid, social security, etc., and you meet outright hostility and accusations of being right wing.
Democratic commitments to entitlement reform ring hollow unless they are willing to get specific and name which programs they’re willing to cut. Otherwise it’s just an empty canard (republicans have their slightly different vice, which is to cut entitlements and cancel out the cuts by boosting defense spending inexplicably.)
Talking about taxes or even discretionary and even military spending with reference to the debt is hand waving. It tells me either people aren’t serious, or are disingeuous. And we know they are both. This is a partisan shell game where they try to use the wedge issue of the debt against Republicans.
What about the capital gains windfall? We know how that turns out in the long run as under Clinton/Bush (we increase the debt anyway), but the Trump Bump must be considered in a net net analysis.
Andrew, I will respond to “capital gains tax windfall” comment. Increasing capital gains tax reduces revenue, as to create a capital gain someone must do a voluntary act, sell something, which they are more unlikely to do if the tax is higher. Tax policy 101. It also reduces economic growth, but that is another story.
So does Jeff Bezos think that continuing this extraneous “pro-state, pro-establishment, pro-left” editorializing benefits him more than owning a newspaper that is known to be highly credible and balanced? Does he see WaPo as a source of profit or does he seek some other kind of benefit from its ownership?
Only tax cuts increase the deficit. And increase the deficit is all tax cuts do. Spending can never be held constant or reduced, for example. So, I don’t see any problem with their narrative.
Why, by the way, do the majority of economists on “both ‘sides'” think eliminating the corporate income tax is a good idea? I’ve never seen the memo.
Did the Washington Post bring that up, btw? Did they bring up the single important issue? Maybe it would be too editorializing to offer revenue-neutral alternatives like a consumption tax, but shouldn’t they bring up the only thing that really matters, that even their team’s economists tend to believe in reducing the corporate income tax?
As in, why isn’t the story “Trump just happens to want the one tax cut that serious economists likewise support, CRAZY, I know, right?!?” Of course, they can still say it’s only because he’s a fascist and just got lucky…but that should be the actual narrative if they weren’t grasping at straws for a biased partisan take on it, right?
And holy smokes, you know who said Trump was a fiscal conservative budget hawk? Right, nobody ever.
You could say this has as little likelihood of passing as his ‘budget’ so it is hardly worth the front page, but it’s a slow news day and it has to be filled with something.
I have same feeling as you in many ways. I dislike Trump. But the media attacks, often unfair, make me want to defend him and make me like him more. It is like the simple rule I have with friends. Never badmouth a person to a person who likes that person more than they like you. They end up disliking you for badmouthing their friend, and liking their friend more.
The interesting thing is how this plays out in 2018 elections. Trump’s polls numbers are bad. Are they real or do they reflect disinterest? My take is everyone who voted for Trump likes him more now, and many that did not vote for him would if given a second chance. But I could, and often am, wrong.