Democrats and their media mouthpieces really, really don’t like it when hard-working Americans get to keep their own money. In their minds, the all-holy government should be able to access as much money as it wants to redistribute.
All of the boilerplate leftist anti-tax cut rhetoric has been blowing up in their faces since the passage of the GOP tax bill last December. After screaming at the tops of their lungs that PEOPLE WERE GOING TO DIE because of the bill, the Democrats were quickly confronted with a reality that featured repeated news of corporations giving unplanned bonuses to employees and a decided lack of dead people.
A narrative shift was obviously in order.
As the bodies kept not piling up (maybe there just weren’t many people left to kill after the repeal of net neutrality ended the world), Democrats decided to inform the beneficiaries of the bonuses that they weren’t really getting much money.
Nancy Pelosi sobered up long enough to refer to a thousand dollars as “crumbs,” then doubled-down on the remark when given an opportunity to back off of it.
This tactic has rather predictably not yielded a lot of public relations upside for the Democrats, so their little helpers at The New York Times came up with a new approach: travel to real America to find people who aren’t thrilled with how the tax cuts are affecting their paychecks.
Not really angry, just sort of “meh,” as the kids say today:
At Slyder’s Tavern, Matt Kazee, a machinist, drank a couple of beers as he waited for burgers to take home for dinner. His tab was about equal to the increase in his take-home pay after President Trump’s tax cut found its way into the nation’s paychecks.
“I have seen a little uptick in my paycheck, about what I expected, about 30 bucks,” said Mr. Kazee, who voted twice for President Barack Obama before backing Mr. Trump in the 2016 election. “It felt to me about like where things were 15 years ago.”
His underwhelmed reaction was not what Republicans had in mind.
An extra bar tab a month may not seem like much to a New York Times reporter, but there are plenty of us who’d sign up for that deal in a heartbeat.
Then the reporter gets to the serious business of spinning the “news” to fit the narrative:
But the result has hardly been a windfall, economically or politically. Other workers described their increase as enough for a week’s worth of gas or a couple of gallons of milk, with an additional $40 in a paycheck every two weeks on the high side to $2 a week on the low. Few are complaining, but the working class here is not feeling flush with newfound wealth.
Of course there hasn’t been a windfall. Tax cuts that return money to employees via paychecks don’t work that way, thanks to the insidious way payroll taxes are done in this country.
One of the reasons that it is easy to tax American workers to the point of financial paralysis is that it’s done incrementally. Many on the lower-taxes side of the aisle have long said that if every American had to pay taxes like we self-employed people do there might never be another Democrat elected again.
The twin built-in feature of this slow torture taxation model for the pro-tax side is that they can be stealthier about increasing the burden, then dismissive about any incremental relief.
Per the article, the median household income in the area where the people were being interviewed is $46,000 a year.
That $40 in the bi-weekly paycheck comes out to over one thousand dollars for the year. Anyone making $46K isn’t going to sneeze at that.
Unless, of course, their government doles it out in increments to small to cause any excitement.
When someone wins a huge lottery jackpot, he or she is given the option of taking a lump sum single payout, or having a larger sum paid out over a period of years.
People tend to opt for the former, even though it’s less money.
People want all of their money now, not in an allowance.
No one gets truly excited about the allowance. The Times knew that.
If they really wanted to do some reporting, they’d send someone to interview a decent sample of people who had received the bonuses on top of the reduced paycheck tax burden.
Probably a lot less shoulder shrugging going on there.
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