A Friday afternoon item at the Associated Press by reporter Marcy Gordon was supposedly meant to educate American workers about changes coming to their net paychecks next month. Instead, Gordon understated the likelihood that people will see increases in their take-home pay, and played the tired class warfare card.
Gordon's opening:
The headline tells readers that their paycheck "may be going up." Any otherwise under-informed reader would interpret "may" as "50-50 at best."
Gordon's opening verbiage barely improves on that. "Millions ... should start seeing fatter paychecks" might seem like a strong statement — but it's certainly not in the context of 147 million payroll employees. "Millions" could be only a few percent of all Americans.
Gordon waited until her 14th of 17 paragraphs to acknowledge the reality "that the law will bring lower taxes for the great majority of Americans, though not all."
Even that admission understates the scope of the new law's impact. Here is a state-by-state detail by income quintile of just how "great" that "majority" really is, assembled from data found at a related state-based article found at CNBC in late December (click on image to see it in a separate tab or window):
84 percent of individual return-filing taxpayers will get a tax cut in 2018. (I did a weighted-average calculation based on state populations and came up with the same answer.) It would have been so easy and far more informative for Gordon to be specific and write that "over 80 percent" will get a tax cut, but she wouldn't do it.
Gordon's attempt to bring class warfare into her dispatch reads as follows:
Billed as a huge benefit for the stressed middle class, it brings the biggest overhaul of the U.S. tax code in three decades, reaching into every corner of American society and the economy. The $1.5 trillion package provides generous tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest Americans, and more modest reductions for middle- and low-income individuals and families.
The tired argument that "the wealthiest Americans" are the ones getting "generous" tax cuts, besides containing the offensive implied assumption that the government is the source of all money and therefore all generosity, vastly understates the across-the-board nature of Americans' tax savings, as seen in a CNBC-based state-by-state analysis by quintile found here. Note that the analysis considers all tax filers, not just those who are seeing their taxes come down in 2018.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
