Geoge Will’s column today contains the best sentence he’s written in years:
Most of the nonstop noise emanating from the White House is white noise — audible wallpaper, there but unnoticed.
He goes on to consider the overheated remarks about the tax reform bill making its way through the Congress:
The 1986 tax reform radically simplified the tax code. Since then, the code has acquired more than 15,000 new wrinkles. The 2017 tax legislation might — this is difficult to measure — have managed the minor miracle of making the 70,000-page code more complicated. On a scale of importance from one (negligible) to 10 (stupendous), the legislation might be a three. Never mind. Cue the Cassandras. This tax cut of less than 1 percent of the next decade’s projected GDP is “the worst bill in the history of the United States Congress†(House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi). It “will result in 10,000 extra deaths per year†and “our country will be living on a shoestring for decades†( former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers).
which is precisely why I’m confident that the bill won’t be as bad as its critics have been declaiming. Mr. Will considers the reactions in the light of one of Eric Hoffer’s apothegms:
The intellectual cannot operate at room temperature.
a characterization of the public intellectuals of the late 60s and early 70s. Another celebrity of that period might have said that in the future, the future we’re living in, everybody will be outraged for fifteen minutes.
That’s the problem with the deluge news, commentary, trivia, and drivel with which we’re continuously inundated these days. You’ve got to express inordinate outrage merely to be heard above the din and that sort of outrage crowds out considered thought.
It presents a mighty temptation to stop listening to the news, close Facebook, and delete your Twitter account. Franklin would have loved it but I wonder what Jefferson would have thought of it. Can there be an informed electorate these days?
Also embedded within the outrage is a reactive stance that doesn’t set the stage for what a Democratic alternative would be. Are the D’s the party that will raise taxes, lower taxes on everybody making under $300,000, become the party of fiscal responsibility? Ultimately it looks like the D’s are going to address party identity in the context of the 2020 election cycle.
“Can there be an informed electorate these days?”
Judging by the competing inaccurate memes that litter social media, no.
I keep coming back to Brink Lindsey’s 2009 essay on partisanship, which I’ve posted here many times:
I have a lot of friends and family, real and virtual, from all sides of the aisle and this is the kind of thing I see all the time. Each side has it’s own “facts” which prove the other side wrong. There’s not even a common frame of reference in many cases.
BTW, I recently watched some youtube interviews of Ken Stern promoting his new book about breaking out of the liberal bubble. It seems there are a lot of lessons there and they don’t just apply to liberal groupthink.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-i-left-the-liberal-bubble-and-learned-to-love-the-right
BTW, have you read this lecture – “Age of Outrage” yet? I found it to be quite good and relevant to this post.
Actually, nearly everyone is getting a tax reduction. The rich get more simply because they pay more in taxes. The poor get nothing because they do not pay federal income taxes.
The most important feature is the tax reduction on businesses. We had by far the highest tax rate on businesses in the world. This tax break will greatly improve the competitiveness of American business, result in a large repatriation of earnings and jobs, and be the basis of a surge in employment, income and economic growth for everyone. 2018 will be a very good year.
“. This tax break will greatly improve the competitiveness of American business, result in a large repatriation of earnings and jobs, and be the basis of a surge in employment, income and economic growth for everyone.”
Or it will just make those at the top even better off, the result of recent tax cuts. The result when foreign earnings were last repatriated. I think we should wait and see before celebrating.
Perhaps most disappointing that tit was billed as tax reform and t mostly just looks like tax cut. If things were simplified, it is hard to see. Some guy on the radio this morning, forget who, said the big winners were the accountants as things just got more complicated.
Steve
It’s simplified for middle-income households with primarily wage income. The increased standard deduction means far fewer people will itemize.
Other than that though, I don’t see a lot of simplification.
Also, I think it’s important to point out that the stock market and corporate earnings doesn’t primarily benefit the wealthy.
Based upon the bizarre and hysterical outrage of Democrats over the tax bill its fairly obvious they are afraid it will work just fine.
“Indeed, nearly all of the stock ownership in the U.S. is concentrated among the richest. According to Wolff’s data, the top 20 percent of Americans owned 92 percent of the stocks in 2013. Put another way: Eighty percent of Americans together owned just 8 percent of all stocks.Mar 1, 2017″
The figures below show that, since the late 1980s, about 80 percent of the value of the market has been held by the top 10 percent. Within that top 10 percent, the share of stock wealth held by the top 1 percent is about equal to the share held by the 90-99th percentiles; both groups’ shares are twice as large as the share that the entire bottom 90 percent holds.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/02/perspective-on-the-stock-market-rally-80-of-stock-value-held-by-top-10/?utm_term=.f3e875d5bc35
Steve
Nice paper on effects of large mergers which fall short of monopolies.
http://microeconomicinsights.org/millercoors-joint-venture-changed-competition-u-s-brewing/
Steve
If I understand correctly, owning stock is one way to become wealthy, and the majority of stock owners are wealthy.
People who live paycheck-to-paycheck and/or have little or no savings are not buying a lot of stock. I realize that this is a revelation to the smartest-people-in-the-whole-wide-world, but it is true nonetheless.
Steve,
I skimmed the paper that formed the basis of the WaPo editorial. the editorial is misleading because it actually doesn’t include all equities – in particular, equities for public employee and defined benefit pensions aren’t included.
Still, I think what I wrote earlier is wrong. However, given that retirement investment is the largest share of the stock market, the stock market and its valuation is important for many Americans who aren’t wealthy.
Based upon the bizarre and hysterical outrage of Democrats over the tax bill its fairly obvious they are afraid it will work just fine.
Yo, Gaunoeri, it might surprise you, but most Democrats would be delighted to discover that they are wrong about this, since it is passed and it is happening. Not everyone puts party ahead of country.
On the surface, this seems like a terrible tax bill that will bankrupt the American government, create no jobs and be used as an excuse to cut social security and Medicare. But I would be happy to be wrong. If America does well, I do well.
It’s like that president of yours, who prevaricates and accuses and lies about his relationship to Russia. I would love to discover that his transition team just didn’t take their reporting requirements seriously and that they aren’t actually traitors. That would honestly be less worse. I wish he would come clean, and I would rather it be incompetence and arrogance rather than treason.
The WaPo article was pretty simple minded, and a classic bit of sophistry with statistics as well.
Setting aside statistical bobbing and weaving, and conflating issues, they might as well have written an article saying doctors make more than McDonalds workers. Hold on, let me get a pen and paper so I can write that down….
“Yo, Gaunoeri, it might surprise you…….”
Blah blah blah
Yo, Gus, you cultured one. Guarneri. An Italian luthier. Like Stradivari. Also the model of the Sonus Faber stereo speakers adorning one of my listening rooms.
Yo, Gus, you cultured one. Guarneri. An Italian luthier.
Whatever, Lute-boy.
My point still stands — your claim that “bizarre and hysterical outrage of Democrats over the tax bill its fairly obvious they are afraid it will work just fine“ is nonsense.