The chart above comes from the New York Times, which apparently decided that it’s safe to spill the beans now: the Trump tax cut really is a tax cut for most Americans. The ironic thing about the Times article, “Face It: You (Probably) Got a Tax Cut”
is that it reveals one of the more effective anti-Trump, anti-Republican Big Lies, this one being that the 2017 tax cut was really a sham, benefiting the rich while soaking the poor. The Times, in many ways, large and small, helped sustain that lie, with the results above. What is this? Is it like the amateur magician who has to reveal how his trick was pulled off? Is it the practical jokester who has to shout “It was all a gag!” so he can see your shock? You can almost feel the Times’s metaphorical chest swell with pride as it writes,
If you’re an American taxpayer, you probably got a tax cut last year. And there’s a good chance you don’t believe it. Ever since President Trump signed the Republican-sponsored tax bill in December 2017, independent analyses have consistently found that a large majority of Americans would owe less because of the law. Preliminary data based on tax filings has shown the same. Yet as the first tax filing season under the new law wraps up on Monday, taxpayers are skeptical. A survey conducted in early April for The New York Times by the online research platform SurveyMonkey found that just 40 percent of Americans believed they had received a tax cut under the law. Just 20 percent were certain they had done so. That’s consistent with previous polls finding that most Americans felt they hadn’t gotten a tax cut, and that a large minority thought their taxes had risen — though not even one in 10 households actually got a tax increase.
The Times goes on, infuriatingly,
To a large degree, the gap between perception and reality on the tax cuts appears to flow from a sustained — and misleading — effort by liberal opponents of the law to brand it as a broad middle-class tax increase. …In convincing people that they would not benefit, “the Democrats did a very good job,” said Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center. “They were able to put that into the public perception, and the reality has been unable to break that perception.”
Gee, I wonder who allowed the Democrats to “put that into the public perception”? Did they send radio waves into our skulls? Program Manchurian Tax Candidates to falsely advise us?
Here’s another Times graph:
Why did so many more Republicans believe that they really got a tax cut? Maybe because more Republicans have learned not to trust news media accounts, and to assume that they are really partisan efforts to support Big Lies. I guess the Times decided that after more than a year, the misconception had done its work—helping the Democrats take back Congress, for example.
Enemy of democracy, enemy of the nation, enemy of the People.
And proud of it
____________________________________
Pointer: Tax Prof Blog
Ethics Alarms 
Jack, Jack, Jack. Come on, buddy, you’re missing the point. Which is: Whatever Democrats believe to be the case trumps whatever actually is the case. You’re not seeing the forest for the trees. Never, ever confuse a Democrat with facts. They’re always right and anyone who’s not a Democrat is always wrong. It’s simple. Come on, get with the program.Haven’t you learned anything from your Facebook friends?
anyone who’s not a Democrat is always
wrongrascist.Ftfy
If you’re lucky. Just as often there’s one step – silence the conservative by calling him a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe, or ignorant. If none of these apply then shouting will do.
Steve-O-in-NJ wrote, “Just as often there’s one step – silence the conservative by calling him a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe, or ignorant.”
That’s the go-to attack the messenger tactic the left uses after they’ve declared/implied the Conservative wrong.
As a tax preparer, I can testify that nearly everyone did get their taxes reduced. Even the ones who were probably worst off — those with a lot of itemized deductions due to taxes paid, and either no kids or several kids — they tended not to be worse off because the tax brackets changes and lower tax rates countered the effect of losing those deductions.
What I did see is that people’s taxes went down, but so did their withholding, so that their refunds were similar to last year or perhaps somewhat lower. It’s a difficult equation for a lot of people to understand, especially if you only look at the end product refund.
I also saw that a lot of people were very apprehensive this year when coming in to do their taxes and most were relieved that the reality was better than they feared.
DG, would that newspaper reporters had thought to interview someone like you. You know, someone who knows a great deal about the issue. Thanks for the comment from the front lines.
DG makes a great point about actual tax liability and refunds.
I have gotten into more arguments with those that claim their taxes went up because they got a slightly smaller refund this year. They cannot grasp the idea that reduced withholdings simply give you your tax cut sooner.
Agreed. People don’t equate more take home wages and reduced taxes from the check with tax cuts. They are accustomed to receiving larger refunds so for this tax year, where their refund was smaller, they concluded that they did not get tax breaks.
They also don’t equate a large tax refund with a non-interest bearing loan to the government. Also, the average tax obligation did decrease but the Social Security portion stayed the same.
Yes, but the “the tax cut is a scam and not a cut for ordinary Americans” was the media carried narrative long before tax season.
Absolutely, it was a misinformation offensive. It’s pretty scary to realize how much “news” is actually prepared stories provided by various advocacy groups. The “writers” and “reporters” simply cut and paste the prepared stories and send them on to their editors who publish them.
OB, Jr. does PR for restaurants. The newspaper published articles he submits to them on behalf of clients. They are usually published in their entirety under the byline of the paper’s food writers.
Newspaper people are not only biased, they’re lazy.
Here’s a great discussion of what’s being done in Seattle along these lines: https://www.city-journal.org/seattleforall-campaign
The government, media and NGOs have hired a PR firm to manage a massive disinformation campaign against the citizens of the city. Druggies shooting up on the street? What druggies?
Other BillI’d wrote, “The government, media and NGOs have hired a PR firm to manage a massive disinformation campaign against the citizens of the city. Druggies shooting up on the street? What druggies?”
That’s…
Are republicans more distrustful of the media, are they better at math, or do they just approach problems more rationally and less emotionally?
I just looked at how much I owed in taxes this year and compared it to last year to get my answer.
Mine wasn’t that simple. I paid $8K more this year than I did last – because the Trump economy has been so good for me. It would have been $22K more without the tax cut.
The refund also looked bad, I went from a $600 refund to $5K due.
The new tax plan has made taxes much more predictable. Less that 10% can itemize, because what couple has more than $24,000 in deductible expenses? Because it is so much more predictable, the witholding tables are more accurate and closer to what you actually owe. Therefore, rebates are smaller, but amounts owed should also be smaller. That is the goal of witholding, to get an accurate estimate of the taxes, not one to give you a big rebate.
Oh, the tax programs also tell you what your actual tax percentage is, so it actually is pretty simple if you do your own taxes.
It’s actually even a little bit better than the charts show…
The 0-30,000 bracket is misleading. A significant amount of the people in it didn’t receive a tax cut because they didn’t pay taxes to begin with. If you removed people who had no taxes to cut from the equation, I think the math would settle out something akin to the 30,000-50,000 bracket.
But, but, but, according to my progressive accountant family friend (who does NOT do my taxes), the poorest people are the most highly taxed and only the rich got a tax break. Trump is destroying the economy. Anyone believing the NewYork Times is reading an extremely right slanted publication like the majority of the media.
Progressive thought (she thinks AOC is a centrist and a genius) and TDS has destroyed another intelligent person.
For what it’s worth, my income right now puts me a bit below the poverty level, so I haven’t paid any taxes in nearly ten years. I’m not sure how it is that I became the “most highly taxed” group member.
The math on this is a collection of moving goalposts, but what they’ll generally do is lump every kind of tax together (retail tax, income tax, property tax ect.) and refer to it as “tax”, and then take your earnings, and do economic voodoo, it’s usually a metric between your income and disposable income (post-rent and utilities income, for example), and call that “income”. Then they’ll say that “taxed” paid was a disproportionate amount of poor people’s “income”.
It’s functionally true, but really doesn’t match the common parlance of the term.
Key word, here, being “voodoo”.
AOC calls for boycotting the media:
https://news.yahoo.com/ocasio-cortez-backs-boycott-of-new-york-post-over-cover-attacking-ilhan-omar-214842479.html?.tsrc=daily_mail&uh_test=2_13&fbclid=IwAR3dBU0Jv3LXXFK7ZEX9lG6j9aA6AxYbuvPoJmMrLPRtcTPi0RZIeR6rDbU
We may not have passed the 22nd Amendment to keep FDR from being reelected, but didn’t something similar to this contribute?….
“Should we expand the Supreme Court?”
https://news.yahoo.com/should-we-expand-the-supreme-court-090000499.html
We got a smaller refund. This was more than offset by the extra money in our paychecks the entire year.
We usually itemize. Since they moved the medical deduction from 7.5% to 10%, while upping the standard deduction to $24,000, I did not even bother. I might have gotten a larger refund, but the work involved on a speculative return stopped me.
This made tax season much less stressful, overall.