Americans Short Attention Span - Means Kerry is their Man

Published on August 14, 2004 By Essencay In Current Events

The CBO (Congressional Budget Office) has just released a 29-page report "Effective Federal Tax Rates Under Current Law, 2001 to 2014" Link and I'm betting that most Americans will not take the time to read it. Why? Because it's 29-pages of statistics and tables. You know who understands this? American print media. If you go to Google News and look for articles about this report you'll find 200 hits Link about the impact that George Bush's tax cuts had and every single one of them play on our short attention span and are pretty much saying the same thing....the tax cuts were bad, the only benefited the rich and the middle class got hosed. Who also understands this about Americans? John Kerry. Look at this press release from his headquarters Link not much detail in it. In fact pretty much all it does is reverberate the headlines of the print media. Not too original, but effective. What you won't find an abundance of is articles like this Link that's because it is asking you, the informed American voter to read the report "Don't believe us? You don't have to. Click here for the CBO report...."

So I am asking Americans to do the same. Download the report, it's in pdf format, read it and make an informed decision about our candidates, about what John Kerry is says, about what the American print media is saying and about what should be the most important issue in your lives....your pocketbook.... It's funny how we can sit down and take 2-3 hours to watch a movie or a sporting event, which in the scope of things isn't really important, but we won't spend more than the couple of minutes it takes to read a couple of paragraphs in a news article on something that really matters. Prove me wrong and read the report.

Comments

Gideon MacLeish

on Aug 14, 2004

If you think that the opposition to Bush is based solely on tax cuts, you are sadly mistaken. It is based on a number of factors, his dishonesty, his authoritarian government that has worked at stripping civil liberties from American citizens...I could go on and on, but many other pundits have already done this for me.

If you think that my pocketbook should be the most important thing in the world to me, well, you have your priorities, I have mine. My pocketbook ranks pretty low.

If you think I'm voting for Kerry just because I don't like Bush, again you are wrong. I'm not voting for Kerry, as I can't support the man anymore than I could support Bush.

Still, an excellent and insightful post, and it should help for those who DO believe the way Kerry spins the Bush tax cuts. Thanks for linking it.

Daiwa

on Aug 14, 2004

Thanks for the link, Essencay.

Admittedly I go a bit snowblind trying to wade through tables like that, but it looks to me that the cuts were across the board, tilted a percentage point or two in favor of the top 20%, through 2004, then every income group gets hit with gradually higher effective rates through 2011, with every group up about 2% over 2001 at that point. After most of the tax cuts expire in 2011, then the middle 20% get hit with a slightly higher bump, ending up at about 3% higher rates in 2014 than in 2001, versus the top 20% being up 2%.

Of course, anything the government projects usually pans out to be wrong, or at least gets changed, so I take any such reports with a healthy dose of salt. Given that, how the left could characterize the middle class as having been hosed by the tax cuts is a mystery (well, not really). They may be technically correct in saying that high income groups benefitted more in the short run, so they just say that "Bush's tax cuts favored the rich" and leave the implication hanging that ipso facto the middle class took it in the shorts. The real differences in effective tax rate changes are quite small and when they get translated into effective shares of the tax burden, the top 10%'s share of total federal tax liabilities drops a whopping 1.3%, from 49.1% to 47.8%, through 2011, then actually goes down a tad more after the tax cuts expire.

Hopefully, more folks will take a look at the numbers & not rely on the rhetoric.

Cheers,
Daiwa

eieio

on Aug 14, 2004

I read the story in the paper and I don't get the same conclusions the writer of the piece seemed to get.

This argument always seems to boil down to an argument comparing apples to oranges. Namely, the very rich get a bigger tax cut (in dollars) or the lower income folks get a bigger tax cut (in percentage).

Since income tax is figured in percentages, the cuts are a reduction in percentage.

You really can't have it both ways. If you are going to tax people a percentage of their income, a reduction in the percentage will mean more dollars in refund for the higher income folks.

If you want everyone to get the same dollars knocked off their tax bill with a tax cut, you have to tax everyone the same amount of dollars to begin with.

~ OT - Didn't realize you were blogging here, Essencay. I look forward to reading your ramblings.

Daiwa

on Aug 17, 2004

New developments, Essencay.

This morning's paper (one not particularly well-known for it's objectivity) had a front page article titled:
RICH DID GET RICHER, CENSUS REPORTS

Subheadline:
Job cuts, taxes hurt middle class, poor

Continued page headline:
RICH U.S. income gap continues to widen

The article, simply plucked from the AP wire, was about a Census Bureau report which was released last week, apparently. It reports on income trends over the past 20 years based on census data. Of course, the report makes no attempt at elucidating any causes for the data trends it is reporting, it just reports the data it collected, but that doesn't stop the article's author from letting us know.

A couple of "experts" are quoted giving their opinions about the "two Americas", an obligatory theme in pieces of this sort. Then there is one paragraph which reads: "New government data also show that President Bush's tax cuts have shifted the overall tax burden to the middle class from the wealthiest Americans." The italics are mine. This statement goes without attribution or supporting evidence and clearly cannot be supported by the CBO report that is the subject of this thread. Then the writer launches into a 4-paragraph anecdote about a particular family that's had a tough time of late because her "bank job of 24 years was sent overseas" earlier this year (no documentation, just the person's claim); her husband "can no longer work after an injury." "So the family budget tightened. That meant fewer cable channels, more meals at home, postponed doctor appointments, missed vacations, delayed credit-card payments, all to the 'keep the wolf away from the door, she said." I'm not making this up.

There's more, of course: "The income gap is showing up in booming sales of luxury items. Porsche Cars North America Inc. says sales are up 17 percent for the year. Strong sales at Neiman-Marcus, Nordstroms and Saks Fifth Avenue overshadow lackluster sales at stores such as Wal-Mart, Sears and Payless Shoes." Talk about the sky falling.

After the headlines and the first two-thirds of the article, the author appears to have a slight pang of guilt and decides to try showing a little of the cloud's silver lining, just in case someone with a critical eye manages to get that far. We're treated to the tale of a 38-year-old California real estate agent who's cashing in on the home re-sale and refinancing boom and who recently took his family to Disney World for a vacation. He, his wife and three children now eat out more often and spend more on clothes. They recently bought 2 new cars and plan to buy a larger house in the near future. Of course, it's couched in language hinting he should feel a tad guilty about it.

Finally, the last paragraph closes the story with a quote from an economist: "This really has nothing to do with Bush or Kerry but more to do with the longer-term shift in the structure of the economy." Should have started with that qualifier, but I suppose we should be grateful the auther tucked it in at all.

This is just the kind of misleading and not-so-subtle anti-Bush bias that is so common in a press which is blind to it's own reality and distorted thinking. Anecdotal sob stories prove nothing, but the press uses them to damn our politicians all the time, when it suits their purprose. I went through a very similar difficult patch, with all the same consequences to my family, in the early 1990's when the rest of the economy was just booming along. Did I blame GHWB or Clinton for it? Not at all - I was a victim of a set of circumstances and forces in the economy over which they had little influence. Long-term structural shifts in the economy, which don't lend themselves to simplistic explanations, have short-term casualties. That's always been the case, always will be. Any of us adversely affected must regroup and redirect our efforts, simple as that. I have, and have managed to weather the storm and get back to a reasonable degree of economic comfort. I'm in the higher end of that middle class that's supposedly been hosed so badly, but I'm better off now than I was 4 years ago. That doesn't mean squat when it comes to deciding whether Bush has been a good President or not, because it's unique to me, so it's not offered here as an argument for Bush. Conventional wisdom, and history, have supported the notion that "As goes the economy, so goes the election." So the campaign to convince us that the economy is awful, despite all evidence to the contrary, is in full swing in the desperate hope that we'll swallow the notion and dump Bush out of spite.

Here's the reference:
The Arizona Republic, August 17, 2004
Leigh Strope (AP)

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