Tax Policy Made Simple

An excellent point from Ezra Klein:

For reasons that I try not to speculate on before 9am, the media likes to make policy disputes sound incredibly complicated. Much too complicated for mortals to understand, or base electoral behavior on. Take this Time article on the various tax plans floating around the election. The piece argues that the plans are composed of loosely connected soundbites, lacking numbers or details or real information. To read it, you'd think the two proposals were impossible to estimate, or understand, or in any way summarize. But they're not.

Right. The article is over 1,400 words long and mostly consists of moaning over how the candidates lack specifics or like to distort their plans or distort other people's plans. But the article itself actually contains perfectly clear-cut information about the plans it's just buried amidst tons of other verbiage.

Obama's tax plan would result in somewhat higher overall levels of federal revenue and somewhat lower tax rates for middle income people than would McCain's. McCain's tax plan would result in somewhat lower overall levels of federal revenue and substantially lower tax rates for high income people than would Obama's. The details of the plans are somewhat complicated, but the overall impact on revenues and income distribution is very easy to summarize. And, indeed, the Tax Policy Center has already done the summary in a report I know Time is aware of because it's referenced in the article. They even went through the trouble of making a chart:

Unlike Ezra, I'm willing to speculate and to be somewhat generous to author. If you read a concise, accurate summary of candidate's proposals you come away being a little bit smarter about what's happening in American politics. But if you read a cynicism-laden thing about how it's all incredibly murky and dishonest and everyone's using fuzzy numbers then you come away feeling smarter than all those clueless partisans out there yelling on behalf of McCain or Obama.

Comments

Could be they just can't b ring themselves to admit their King, the Great McCain, isn't all he's cracked up to be, so they'll just take everyone else down with him.

Posted by Notorious P.A.T. | July 28, 2008 10:20 AM

Unlike Ezra, I'm willing to speculate and to be somewhat generous to author.

Well, I'm not. If they included a chart like yours, no one would read the verbiage and everyone would see what was really going on. The Rushbots would whine about librul bias and the corporate owners and advertisers would be worried. In other words, it could only happen on an alternate universe.

Posted by Jeff S. | July 28, 2008 10:25 AM

The conventional media is desperately trying to defend their largely useless and increasingly unpopular political coverage. The only thing keeping them afloat is the fact that a lot of people still aren't entirely sure how to use a computer. Call it The McCain Effect.

Posted by DTM | July 28, 2008 10:26 AM

An openly partisan press, aforementioned on this blog, like they have in European countries, would actually be better than our current, supposedly 'neutral' one, which is kind of the worst of both worlds. Major press outlets in the US don't mean to serve either political party, even if they often do; they mean to serve themselves. Obfuscating things is a huge industry in this country - possibly the biggest 'profession', as it were, of them all. As a society and culture gets more complex, the explication of the complexity has to get better and simpler, not more convoluted.

The situation with the big press like Time is not unlike what I would call the 'Food on the Table' syndrome. Imagine the people who clean the oil from big spills off of birds in Alaska making enough money from that work to form a lobbying group. They would hire a lobbyist to lobby against more secure hulls in oil tankers, because if there are no oil spills - how are they going to put food on the table for Their Family? What about the Children?

Here is a major news organization dealing with information which is fairly critical for the country and the world, and they go out of their way to make things murky, because it's good for their business. They aren't bad people. They're just being 'rational actors'.

You can't blame W Bush for all of the entropy we have in this country, but he does exemplify drift, decay, line of least resistance, incompetence, etc.

Posted by jonnybutter | July 28, 2008 10:55 AM

The author of that Time article, Michael Scherer, is a McCain pool reporter or whatever those guys/gals are called that eat BBQ at Johnny Mac's. He often posts on the Time Blog Swampland, & he just basically parrots the McCain talking points of the day ("surge good; Obama hates America"). Unfort. his obvious bias makes it hard for me to take anything he writes seriously. So you can take that into consideration when you read the article.

Posted by SHF | July 28, 2008 11:27 AM

I started to read the article, and then hesitated because i saw it was written by Michael Scherer. I'm not sure how he got a story on Time's main page, but he's pretty much just a McCain cronie blogger on Time's Swampland, and his bias shows throughout everything he writes. (I kid you not, he actually tried to reflect sexist politics of the rapper Lil Wayne onto Obama, bc Obama mentioned Lil wayne's name in a speech.)
However, bc things like economic plans can be simplified graphs or charts, it benefits McCain to lump both their plans as "fuzzy", when the truth is obviously not. The time article is poorly designed to avoid the simple facts, but then again, Scherer is a very poor writer.

Posted by JT | July 28, 2008 12:46 PM

I love the chart but I'd also like to point out that it wouldn't be that hard to add income ranges for the various population segments so people would understand where they sit. It's really amazing how much most people overestimate where they sit on the income spectrum and so they don't realize that nearly everyone sits in the sweet spot for Obama's tax plan and there is virtually no shot of getting into the rarefied air of the places where McCain would substantially cut your taxes.

Posted by DCMike | July 28, 2008 3:23 PM

In a semi-related note: USA Today's (7/28/08) lead article was about the record federal deficit for FY2009 ($490 billion).

Page 2 had a chart. Lined up the past 4 presidents and their budget deficits each year. No one could miss the fact that the guy before W did a good job on this front, and the other 3 sucked.

Charts: good. Words: bad.

Posted by PDX Pete | July 28, 2008 3:34 PM

The article is over 1,400 words long and mostly consists of moaning over how the candidates lack specifics or like to distort their plans or distort other people's plans. But the article itself actually contains perfectly clear-cut information about the plans it's just buried amidst tons of other verbiage.

Michael Scherer's own article puts the lie to his premise.

Posted by Aaron | July 28, 2008 3:44 PM