Taxes

There are a couple of important economic lessons that the American people should learn. I'm going to title one "the seen and unseen" and the other "narrow well-defined large benefits versus widely dispersed small costs." These lessons are applicable to a wide range of government behavior, but let's look at just two examples.

In November, I noted that the national press, after extensively covering Philadelphia's deceptively named 1.5 cents per ounce "soda tax" when it passed in mid-2016, has ignored its negative fallout, including layoffs at distributors and grocers along with a significant collections shortfall. The non-coverage continues, even though it's clear that the jobs lost aren't coming back, additional jobs…

Friday, California's High-Speed Rail Authority published its draft 2018 Business Plan. Its 800-mile bullet-train project's estimated cost is now $77.3 billion, up from $64 billion two years ago, and its final completion has been pushed out another four years to 2033. The current estimate is now more than 70 percent above the $45 billion presented to voters in 2008. The related Associated Press …

As the popularity of the Republican tax reform legislation has surged, on Wednesday, NBC’s Today show found a new line of attack against the policy – it’s “cruel for families” who have children with rare diseases. That harsh conclusion was drawn based on the assumption that the reduction of a tax credit for pharmaceutical companies in the bill would automatically cause a shortage in medication…

A majority of Americans now support the tax reform package passed by Congress and signed into law by Donald Trump just over two months ago. Just don’t expect the media to tell you about it.

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, a guilt-ridden rich liberal who had an ill-fated run as owner of the liberal magazine The New Republic, was graced on Saturday with a front-page Business Day profile in the New York Times whose very headline mocks the idea of individual achievement: “Inequality: A Secret To His Success.” The subhead: “The Facebook co-founder’s rise was meteoric. He argues that…

The media rarely complain about deficit spending when liberals are at the helm, doling out taxpayer dollars like candy from a parade float. But once Republicans are in control, journalists can’t wait to complain.

The February 2018 stock market correction was painful to watch, but the news media exaggerated the situation — piling on panic and blame with descriptions like “crash” and “freefall” — after ignoring most previous records.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by over 1,000 points by Thursday's closing and the folks at ABC News were eager to place the blame on someone during World News Tonight. That someone, of course, was President Trump and the much welcomed GOP tax cuts, which were responsible for generous bonuses and wage increases across the country.

On Monday, shortly after President Trump asked two employees at a suburban Cincinnati manufacturer to describe their plans for the $1,000 bonuses they had received, MSNBC's Katy Tur ridiculed them on Twitter. Tur considered $1,000 a pittance, and contended that the bonus money wouldn't genuinely help the employees involved achieve their stated goals. On Wednesday, Tur responded poorly to the…

Some people have called for a balanced budget amendment to our Constitution as a means of reining in a big-spending Congress. That's a misguided vision, for the simple reason that in any real economic sense, as opposed to an accounting sense, the federal budget is always balanced. The value of what we produced in 2017 -- our gross domestic product -- totaled about $19 trillion.

The journalists at CBS This Morning on Wednesday whined about the impact that the new Republican tax law will have on blue states, singling out New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and California. Yet, incredibly, reporter Alex Wagner’s entire report managed to never mention that these states have the highest taxes in the country and are wildly in debt. 

At the Cincinnati Enquirer on Monday, reporter Jessie Balmert "fact-checked" President Donald Trump's afternoon speech at a suburban manufacturer. Balmert is the Enquirer reporter who in mid-2016 told readers that there were 220,000 U.S. murders in 2015 (actual number: 15,192). As would be expected, her Monday "fact check" was riddled with obvious errors and distortions.

During his speech Monday in Blue Ash, Ohio, a Cincinnati suburb, President Donald Trump invited two Sheffer Corporation employees to share their plans for the extra money they are receiving because of December's tax law. Minutes later, demonstrating how utterly out of touch she is with working families, MSNBC's Katy Tur posted two error-filled, condescending tweets mocking their plans.