Yesterday, Jed put up a post that made a really good point:
Basically, the strategy here is to decouple the Obama tax cut -- that's the tax cut that everybody, including wealthy people, get on their first $250,000 of income -- and the Bush tax cuts that only go to wealthy people making over $250,000.
It is very seldom made clear that the cut Obama wants to extend applies to everybody not just (!) to the 98% of Americans who make less than $250,000. The NY Times got this wrong this morning in an article by Michael Cooper.
So I wrote Ombud Public Editor Arthur Brisbane a note:
Mr Brisbane--
Today Michael Cooper wrote this:
And only four in 10 voters said they wanted Congress to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for everyone, including families who earn more than a quarter of a million dollars a year, as the Republicans want to do.
This is wrong.
Yesterday, Jackie Calmes wrote this:
With the Bush tax rates due to expire Dec. 31, that fight between Republicans and Mr. Obama, who favors extending the rates only for income below $250,000, will play out in Congress’s lame-duck session this month. On Thursday, the White House served notice that Mr. Obama, who a day earlier signaled a willingness to compromise, would not sign on to any deal making permanent the lower rates for income above $250,000.
“The president does not believe, and I think would not accept, permanently extending the upper-end tax cuts,” said his press secretary, Robert Gibbs.
The two sides could settle for something less than a permanent extension of the top rates, Mr. Gibbs suggested. Democrats say they might agree to a one- or two-year increase, and longer for the middle-income rates.
But Republicans say they will insist that, whatever the duration, all rates must be extended in tandem — the easier to extend them together again in the future. Both sides recognize that, politically, Republicans would have a harder time in the future trying to extend only the rates that benefited the richest Americans, about 2 percent of taxpayers.
This is correct.
ALL Americans would receive the benefits of the Bush tax cuts if they were extended for incomes below $250,000, because, of course, people who earn more pay taxes in the same lower brackets. Ms Calmes correctly reports this, carefully using phrases like "rates that benefited only the richest Americans." It's quite unfortunate, but a testament to the effectiveness of Republican communication strategies, that Mr Cooper's erroneous formulation is by far the most common. While a prominent correction would not be sufficient to undo the widespread promulgation of this error, I think it is consistent with the NY Times mission to make such a correction.
More importantly, as this issue will be hotly debated during the lame duck session of Congress, the Times should be careful to report on this issue accurately in the future.
Thank you
Jay Ackroyd
Manhattan
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I've added the bolding here. It's not in the original email to Brisbane.
Feel free to use any of this text for a Letter to the Editor if you see a syndicated version of this story by Michael Cooper in your local paper.
By the way, it may be that Cooper is quoting verbatim from a polling question. But either he is quoting incompletely, or the polling question itself may be inaccurate. If it's the latter, THEN the story should be that the polling question is inaccurate, probably skewing the results in favor of the extension of the cuts to the top brackets