Taxes

President Trump outlined his tax cut proposal, generating two lead stories in Thursday’s New York Times under the banner headline “Sweeping Trump Tax Plan Vague on Details and Cost.” Economics reporter Binyamin Appelbaum’s “news analysis" was hostile: “Windfall Would Go to the Wealthiest.” The online headline: “Trump Tax Plan Benefits Wealthy, Including Trump.”

On Thursday, while ABC’s Good Morning America and CBS This Morning spent several minutes covering the new Republican tax plan and talked to top Trump administration officials about the policy, NBC’s Today couldn’t even bother to devote a single full report to the topic. Instead, the morning show devoted three times more coverage to the renewal of NBC sitcom Will & Grace.

Thursday on Good Morning America, anchor George Stephanopoulos repeatedly pressed top economic advisor to President Trump, Gary Cohn, to “guarantee” that Trump’s new tax plan wouldn’t give tax breaks to the wealthy, including specifically the President himself. In his usual fashion, Stephanopoulos aggressively confronted the Republican White House official on who would benefit from the president’…

President Trump was in Indiana on Wednesday to unveil the administration’s framework for their ambitious tax reform proposal. The aim of the reform was to grant individuals, families, and businesses the tax relief they so desperately needed. But during their evening newscasts, ABC and NBC failed to mention key details as they pretended not to know how it would help the middle class or affect the…

Like the changing of the seasons, the front of Wednesday’s New York Times featured journalists suddenly rediscovering the national deficit, at least when Republicans are threatening to cut tax rates: “G.O.P. Senators Embrace Plan For Tax Cut That Adds to Deficit.” Such sudden concern for deficits tend to occur among journalists during Republican presidencies or whenever Republicans threaten tax…

As The Mindy Project moves into its final season on Hulu, it's still delivering the irreverent humor that has made it last six seasons. Since the beginning, that has included jabs at both sides of the political aisle and Tuesday's episode "A Romantic Decouplement" was no different. The only problem is that, while the show was right on ObamaCare, it was wrong on First Lady Melania Trump.

The largest threat to our prosperity is government spending that far exceeds the authority enumerated in Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. Federal spending in 2017 will top $4 trillion. Social Security, at $1 trillion, will take up most of it. Medicare ($582 billion) and Medicaid ($404 billion) are the next-largest expenditures. Other federal social spending includes food stamps,…

What just happened? President Trump cut a deal with Democrats to pay for hurricane damage relief and raise the debt ceiling without getting anything in return, except the temporary avoidance of a government shutdown. How to describe this? Was it a sellout, or a pragmatic act? It's football season again, so let's call this deal the "option play." It isn't used much by today's professional players…

After news broke Wednesday night that the President may have struck a deal with Democratic congressional leaders to pass DACA legislation, on Thursday morning, ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Today gushed over how Trump “sounds like a Democrat” when discussing illegal immigration and tax reform.

On Wednesday night, President Trump had dinner at the White House with Senate and House Minority Leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. And in the wake of that development, two of the Big Three Networks (ABC and NBC), who had been almost exclusively negative about Trump for the last several months, suddenly found nice things to say about him.

Appearing as a guest on Wednesday's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof declared that he finds President Donald Trump's tax policy to be "kind of as scary as I find him on North Korea" as he and host O'Donnell fretted over whether he has been showing enough "empathy" on both Hurricane Harvey and on tax reform. The Times columnist also showed…

The journalists on CBS This Morning continued to look for an angle to attack Donald Trump on his response to Hurricane Harvey. The same network that was, just days ago, wondering if the President would be disruptive by visiting flooded areas is now criticizing him for not visiting flooded areas. On Thursday, Major Garrett derided, “Mr. Trump was criticized for not mentioning those killed in the …

The motto of the Trump-era Washington Post is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Its counterpart, suggests David Roberts, might be “Conservatism Lives in Darkness.” “Secrecy,” wrote Roberts on Monday, “is the standard approach of today’s GOP…It is, in fact, the only approach possible to advance an agenda that is unpopular and intellectually indefensible.”

The national press could barely hide its glee in June 2016 when Philadelphia passed a "soda tax" of 1.5 cents per ounce levied against non-alcoholic beverages containing "any form of artificial sugar substitute, including stevia, aspartame, sucralose, neotame, acesulfame potassium (Ace-K), saccharin, and advantame." Now that the predictions of opponents have virtually all come to pass,…