To set the record straight, I am no fan of the GOP’s proposed tax bill. But, while I am happy to say “shame on them,” I also have to say “shame on the media” for doing a terrible job in reporting on it.
Now, there are degrees of shame, from Fox News near-total lying about the tax bill to MSNBC’s dancing around the edges and trying to report what the bill - which still doesn’t exist as I write this, despite all the coverage - would likely contain.
Now, the members of Congress get more blame than the media, because they know more about it than the media does. After all, reporters just talk to their congressional sources to get their information. And those sources often just parrot their party line.
No, my beef with the coverage is that, no matter who is doing the story, the reporters seem to talk only about what this bill could do to the average American. And, I am not average. Nor are you.
Presumably, there are some people in the United States who have our nation’s exact average income and pay our exact average tax bill, have precisely our national average medical expenses and contribute the absolutely average amount to the charity of their choice. Good luck finding them.
I live in New York State. I live in suburban Long Island, where we have county taxes and town taxes and school taxes and library taxes, and special lines on our tax bill to pay for police and farmland preservation and a batch of other things. Some people live in villages, which have their own taxes as well.
Now I haven’t filed a short form tax since my wife and I had our first child. In fact, we didn’t file a short form even before that, because we had lots of deductions. Now people who are single, or who don’t make as much as I do, will save some money under the new tax bill. I will lose, big time. A couple of years ago, our medical expenses were really high - well north of $20,000 - and if that happened to us again, none of the expense would be deductible.
I also live in a state with several big cities, cities which get a lot of state aid to pay for public transportation, and sewers and road repairs and a lot of other things you don’t have in rural areas. It’s not that our state lawmakers are spendthrifts (which they are) or that they waste a lot of money (which they do) or that they all find ways to pay for parks and choral groups or parades in their districts (yep, that too). It’s that you can’t move a half million people into a city to go to work each day and back again each night without having a pretty expensive transit system.
And, if we actually charged people what it costs to ride the train or the bus, we would choke in our own congestion overnight. Just imagine how many people making $30,000 a year could suddenly afford to pay $10 or $15 a day for their trip to work and back.
So, a lot of them would find a better place to live and work. Then, when lunchtime comes, you would have thousands of bankers and lawyers lining up at the local deli. A lot of the delivery people would be gone.
Want to get up at 4 a.m. to be at work at 9 a.m., then get home at 10 p.m. because twice or three times the number of cars are trying to get over a bridge? Enough of those kinds of problems and our cities will start dying. Soon after that, the people from our vast rural areas who don’t want to pay higher taxes to support those free-spending city people will see their rural economy start dying as well.
Why? Well, instead of filling a freight car or two with hot dogs for the supermarkets, you would have to fill 10,000 or 20,000 trucks to get the same hot dogs to all those new spread-out customers. Same thing with peanut butter, local bank offices and movie theaters.
Ever wonder why the Post Office is always running out of money? It’s because Congress won’t let it shut down all those underused rural post offices. But, that’s another story.
But I digress. Here’s the point. The impact of the tax cut on me is not the same as it is for people living in Utah or Alaska. Just as the impact on someone with five million dollars in the bank (or in stock or bonds or strange financial investments involving Ireland or China) is different than on someone who just works and makes a lot of overtime.
And, yet, all I keep hearing from the media is the impact of the tax bill on the average family or the average worker. As if there was such a thing.
Here’s an idea. Let Sean Hannity (who reportedly made $29 million in 2015) or Rachel Maddow (who reportedly made $6 million in 2015) explain how the tax bill would affect them, and then compare it with the tax impact on a typical worker. The math would be easy - if one worker makes $50,000 a year, 20 workers bring in $1 million. We could easily calculate how much 120 of those workers pay in taxes and compare it to Rachel’s tax bill, or 580 of those workers pay in taxes and compare it to Sean’s tax bill. Both of them are smart enough to take advantage of the new bill’s tax provisions, whatever they may be.
It still wouldn’t tell us how the deductibility of state taxes or medical benefits would hit each of those workers, or how their local church or hospital would react to the loss of no-longer-deductible donations, but it would give us all some kind of numbers to look at.
Just don’t call them an average.
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