I Am Interested In Politics
[b][u][center][big]America’s Most Anti-Reform Institution?
The Media[/big][/center][/u][/b]
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
April 28, 2017 6:11 p.m. ET
As team Trump digs into taxing, spending and health-care reform, it’s learning a vital lesson of Washington. Once a government benefit is given, it can never be taken away. If young people have been overcharged by ObamaCare so middle-aged people can be undercharged, then the solution is to undercharge young people too. The taxpayer—usually visualized as a hedge fund manager—can always pay more.
Ditto the budget as a whole. The Washington Post moans that the White House’s new spending plan would “eliminate the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which coordinates the federal response to homelessness across 19 federal agencies,” including providing funding for “Meals on Wheels, a national nonprofit group that delivers food to homebound seniors.”
Never mind that Meals on Wheels is not a federal program. Funding comes from private donations and state and local governments, sometimes using small parts of federal block grants.
The Post further moans that the Trump budget “guts federal funding for affordable housing and kicks the financial responsibility of those programs to states and local governments.”
Never mind that the federal government doesn’t have access to resources the states and localities don’t. Its tax base is their tax base. If housing subsidies are a local priority, let local leaders raise and spend the money locally. They are likely to do a better job addressing a local problem than Washington is.
Such considerations are logical but go unmentioned in the rush to suggest any cut in spending is unendurable. Budget debates are conducted in terms of sob stories: What? You’re not in favor of meals for the elderly? You’re not in favor of export loans for small manufacturers? You don’t think our fighting men and women deserve the best equipment and training money can buy?
Try it yourself. It’s all sob stories, never a discussion of costs and benefits.
The second shoe fell with the Trump tax plan this week, though it was the same shoe as far as the media was concerned. “Trump’s Plan Shifts Trillions to Wealthiest,” went the New York Times headline.
Shifts? The plan doesn’t raise taxes on anybody, except the affluent and businesses by ending certain deductions, and does so partly to pay for lower rates for the affluent and businesses. There is no taking from the poor to give to the rich. Our income tax is almost exclusively a tax of the affluent and business. Working-class Americans are taxed through payroll taxes, which fall far short, even so, of covering their expected future benefits.
As long as the basic structure of American taxes remains intact, the rich would be postponing future tax payments—hopefully fattened by faster growth rather than higher tax rates—to give themselves a tax cut now. As any who are not completely blinded by partisanship will admit, the Trumpian goal here is to bring the economy back to a speedier long-term growth rate. Even the New York Times acknowledges as much, in the 17th paragraph.
There may be much to regret in President Trump’s temperament, his nonmastery of detail, his estrangement from the facts. Not without utility, though, is his generalized disdain for the major media, the most reflexively anti-reform institution in American life. Both major parties look like hotbeds of freethinking in comparison.
The media are a major factor in the outcomes we get. Large spending commitments are willed into being without willing the tax revenues or economic growth to pay for them. Social Security and Medicare are in a $70 trillion hole. Unfunded pension and health-care liabilities of the states and localities are at least $2 trillion. Federal debt has doubled to $20 trillion in less than 10 years. GDP growth has fallen by half. In our next recession, annual deficits could quickly surge to $1 trillion.
Our comeuppance lies in a less and less distant future. But today we get only the horror of any proposed budget cut. We get the intolerability of any entitlement reform—and will continue to get such reporting right up to the day when it all unravels. Any cut in the nominal tax rate for affluent taxpayers is an attack on the poor even if this claim has no relation to the logic of how our tax system actually works.
Entitlements won’t entitle: Medicare will pay for an operation only at a price no doctor will accept. Programmed into law already is a 29% across-the-board cut to Social Security when its trust fund runs out in 12 years.
Then, in the other great twitch of American journalism, will come the blame-laying. The finger will be pointed at everybody but the press itself for wringing out of our politicians any inclination they might have mustered to meet our challenges head-on.
Appeared in the Apr. 29, 2017, WSJ print edition.
The Media[/big][/center][/u][/b]
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
April 28, 2017 6:11 p.m. ET
As team Trump digs into taxing, spending and health-care reform, it’s learning a vital lesson of Washington. Once a government benefit is given, it can never be taken away. If young people have been overcharged by ObamaCare so middle-aged people can be undercharged, then the solution is to undercharge young people too. The taxpayer—usually visualized as a hedge fund manager—can always pay more.
Ditto the budget as a whole. The Washington Post moans that the White House’s new spending plan would “eliminate the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which coordinates the federal response to homelessness across 19 federal agencies,” including providing funding for “Meals on Wheels, a national nonprofit group that delivers food to homebound seniors.”
Never mind that Meals on Wheels is not a federal program. Funding comes from private donations and state and local governments, sometimes using small parts of federal block grants.
The Post further moans that the Trump budget “guts federal funding for affordable housing and kicks the financial responsibility of those programs to states and local governments.”
Never mind that the federal government doesn’t have access to resources the states and localities don’t. Its tax base is their tax base. If housing subsidies are a local priority, let local leaders raise and spend the money locally. They are likely to do a better job addressing a local problem than Washington is.
Such considerations are logical but go unmentioned in the rush to suggest any cut in spending is unendurable. Budget debates are conducted in terms of sob stories: What? You’re not in favor of meals for the elderly? You’re not in favor of export loans for small manufacturers? You don’t think our fighting men and women deserve the best equipment and training money can buy?
Try it yourself. It’s all sob stories, never a discussion of costs and benefits.
The second shoe fell with the Trump tax plan this week, though it was the same shoe as far as the media was concerned. “Trump’s Plan Shifts Trillions to Wealthiest,” went the New York Times headline.
Shifts? The plan doesn’t raise taxes on anybody, except the affluent and businesses by ending certain deductions, and does so partly to pay for lower rates for the affluent and businesses. There is no taking from the poor to give to the rich. Our income tax is almost exclusively a tax of the affluent and business. Working-class Americans are taxed through payroll taxes, which fall far short, even so, of covering their expected future benefits.
As long as the basic structure of American taxes remains intact, the rich would be postponing future tax payments—hopefully fattened by faster growth rather than higher tax rates—to give themselves a tax cut now. As any who are not completely blinded by partisanship will admit, the Trumpian goal here is to bring the economy back to a speedier long-term growth rate. Even the New York Times acknowledges as much, in the 17th paragraph.
There may be much to regret in President Trump’s temperament, his nonmastery of detail, his estrangement from the facts. Not without utility, though, is his generalized disdain for the major media, the most reflexively anti-reform institution in American life. Both major parties look like hotbeds of freethinking in comparison.
The media are a major factor in the outcomes we get. Large spending commitments are willed into being without willing the tax revenues or economic growth to pay for them. Social Security and Medicare are in a $70 trillion hole. Unfunded pension and health-care liabilities of the states and localities are at least $2 trillion. Federal debt has doubled to $20 trillion in less than 10 years. GDP growth has fallen by half. In our next recession, annual deficits could quickly surge to $1 trillion.
Our comeuppance lies in a less and less distant future. But today we get only the horror of any proposed budget cut. We get the intolerability of any entitlement reform—and will continue to get such reporting right up to the day when it all unravels. Any cut in the nominal tax rate for affluent taxpayers is an attack on the poor even if this claim has no relation to the logic of how our tax system actually works.
Entitlements won’t entitle: Medicare will pay for an operation only at a price no doctor will accept. Programmed into law already is a 29% across-the-board cut to Social Security when its trust fund runs out in 12 years.
Then, in the other great twitch of American journalism, will come the blame-laying. The finger will be pointed at everybody but the press itself for wringing out of our politicians any inclination they might have mustered to meet our challenges head-on.
Appeared in the Apr. 29, 2017, WSJ print edition.
