April 30, 2017
No, the Post would never try to read the president’s mind to make Trump look bad. Instead it read Trump’s mind to make him look good. The second paragraph of the lead article told readers:
“With an eye toward keeping his core promise of creating jobs and ramping up economic growth, Trump has fixated on tax reform as the next undertaking of his administration — an opportunity for him to land a first major legislative victory after repeated failures to pass a health-care package.”
Hmmm, so the Post knows that the reason Donald Trump wants to eliminate the estate tax is to create jobs and ramp up economic growth, as opposed to save his children and those of other billionaires from paying billions of dollars in taxes? It’s great they have such mind-reading abilities, otherwise we would might find it hard to believe, since eliminating the estate tax is likely to have no noticeable impact on growth.
In the same vein, Trump’s proposal to create the mother of all loopholes, by allowing pass-through corporations to just pay a 15 percent tax rate (as opposed to the 39.6 percent tax rate now paid by high income individuals) was intended to give his family and other rich people an enormous tax break. The only job creation from this tax cut is likely to be in the tax shelter industry as the nation’s rich restructure their income to show up in pass-through corporations.
We might say the same about Trump’s plan to eliminate the alternative minimum tax. While this move is likely to score pretty much a zero on the job creation front, it would likely save Trump tens, if not hundreds, of millions annually on his tax bill.
Newspapers with reporters less skilled in mind reading would be stuck reporting on just what the president and his staff say and do. Thankfully, we have the Washington Post to tell us Donald Trump’s real motives.
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