Biden’s fitness for a second term

I was going to just let your post go and not respond, because it's like talking to a brick wall.  I will probably regret this, but I wanted to explain where I was coming from.  I quoted an article from 2017 to show you the projected tax cuts.  They were intentionally designed to skew towards the top 1 % and increase over time.  I was trying to explain why your opinion from 2019 was different from every other more recent non partisan source that we have shown you.

Even if I agree with you about NPR (I don't but thats another issue) and we exclude that article, we have shown you a number of other articles from non partisan sources showing how the Trump tax cuts benefit the top 1% disproportionately.  In comparison, you quoted 1 opinion piece based on 2017 data.


Yes, these are older articles.  I'm trying to show you that the one opinion you quoted was the exception, not the rule.  Even back then, analysis showed that the tax cuts disproportionately benefitted the top 1%

www.brookings.edu/articles/the-middle-class-needs-a-tax-cut-trump-didnt-give-it-to-them/

The new tax law—known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA)—will exacerbate this trend. The benefits of the law tilt toward the well-off both now and in the future, according to the distributional analysis of the Tax Policy Center. By 2027, benefits of the tax law flow entirely to the rich. (The Joint Committee on Taxation finds similar results using a different measure.)


December 18, 2017
In general, higher income households receive larger average tax cuts as a percentage of after-tax income, with the largest cuts as a share of income going to taxpayers in the 95thto 99th percentiles of the income distribution. On average,in 2027 taxes would change little for lower-and middle-income groups and decrease for higher-income groups



This one is a more recent analysis and shows again how the top 1-5% benefitted disproportionately from the tax cuts.  

www.americanprogress.org/article/biden-tax-proposals-would-correct-inequities-created-by-trump-tax-cuts-and-raise-additional-revenues/

REPORT
APR 14, 2023

The TCJA made sweeping changes to the nation’s tax laws—including some for low- and middle-income households—that provided the largest tax cuts to the wealthy.9 The law included four major changes expiring at the end of 2025 that were overwhelmingly tilted to high-income Americans:
Cutting the top tax rate:
Creating a new pass-through loophole: The TCJA allows owners of partnerships, limited liability companies, and other so-called pass-through businesses to escape tax on 20 percent of their income
Dramatically reducing the alternative minimum tax (AMT): The AMT was designed to ensure that higher-income people who claim certain tax breaks pay at least some minimal amount of personal income tax.
Lowering taxes on inherited wealth:

Taken as a whole, the TCJA slashed the taxes of the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans by an average of $193,380 in its first year of implementation—more than 200 times the average $930 reduction for households in the middle fifth of the income distribution.

Making the 2017 changes permanent would also compound the damage done to the fairness of the tax code by extending large tax breaks for the wealthy and exacerbating inequities that enable them to shelter large shares of their income from taxation. The top 0.1 percent of households would receive an average tax cut more than 175 times the size of that received by middle-income families, on average—$175,710 as compared with $990, respectively, in 2026—and the poorest fifth of households would receive, on average, just $100. Moreover, high-income households would continue to benefit from the already permanent corporate tax cuts discussed above.

I heard you the first time. I can still see that he is saying things that are easily disproven.

Ok. Can you provide credible evidence to counter any of what they say? The article I posted contains links to all their source data. You must have access to some other data that disproves theirs, right?

(ALEC, btw, is funded primarily by wealthy corporations looking out for their shareholders, and is still pushing ludicrous trickle down policies that have been failing for 40 years. I don’t know why anyone would listen to them.)

Your source there makes the mistake of presuming that anyone who disagrees with far-right policy is a radical leftist communist. By any normal standards, the policies preferred by CBPP are moderately liberal and typical of other advanced societies. Being criticized by far-right, anti-democracy groups like ALEC and the Daily Signal (Heritage Foundation owned) hardly discredits them.

The bit about poverty rates falling after the Clinton welfare reform is a nice bit of cherry-picking, too. Poverty rates initially fell, but when the economy took a downturn in 2008, they increased again to rates higher than before.

Oh wait, there’s more - Influence Watch was started by and is funded by the CRC, a right-wing group started by a Heritage Foundation member. Sure, that’s a reliable source. 🙄

What’s the context?

So I’ll take that bit of nonsense to mean that no, you do not have credible evidence to disprove anything the CBPP said.

From the Free Press….   link


“I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.”

Uri Berliner, a veteran at the public radio institution, says the network lost its way when it started telling listeners how to think.
By Uri Berliner
April 9, 2024

You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.   

I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.

So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back. As a senior editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we’ve covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media, and AI.
It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.

In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.

If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.

But it hasn’t.

For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own—engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise.

Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.

By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.

That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.

Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.

Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.
Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.
It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.

What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media.
Russiagate was not NPR’s only miscue.

In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here’s how NPR’s managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.

The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.
When the essential facts of the Post’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency.

Politics also intruded into NPR’s Covid coverage, most notably in reporting on the origin of the pandemic. One of the most dismal aspects of Covid journalism is how quickly it defaulted to ideological story lines. For example, there was Team Natural Origin—supporting the hypothesis that the virus came from a wild animal market in Wuhan, China. And on the other side, Team Lab Leak, leaning into the idea that the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab.

The lab leak theory came in for rough treatment almost immediately, dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory. Anthony Fauci and former NIH head Francis Collins, representing the public health establishment, were its most notable critics. And that was enough for NPR. We became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even declaring that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists.

But that wasn’t the case.

When word first broke of a mysterious virus in Wuhan, a number of leading virologists immediately suspected it could have leaked from a lab there conducting experiments on bat coronaviruses. This was in January 2020, during calmer moments before a global pandemic had been declared, and before fear spread and politics intruded.

Reporting on a possible lab leak soon became radioactive. Fauci and Collins apparently encouraged the March publication of an influential scientific paper known as “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Its authors wrote they didn’t believe “any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

But the lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t die. And understandably so. In private, even some of the scientists who penned the article dismissing it sounded a different tune. One of the authors, Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist from Edinburgh University, wrote to his colleagues, “I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural.”

Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at NPR, we weren’t about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story. We didn’t budge when the Energy Department—the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research—concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.

Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on February 28, 2023, by asserting confidently that “the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus.”

When a colleague on our science desk was asked why they were so dismissive of the lab leak theory, the response was odd. The colleague compared it to the Bush administration’s unfounded argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won’t get fooled again. But these two events were not even remotely related. Again, politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.”



This thing goes on gorever.  If you want to read the entire opinion piece the link is at the top.

Everyone should please note, that Uri Berliner piece did not appear in what we might think is “the Free Press,” i.e., the Detroit Free Press, an established mainstream newspaper.

www.thefp.com, where this opinion piece appeared, is a right-wing news and opinion site.

Stating a fact is not a “personal dig”.  

You took what this guy said as an actual fact when it was an opinion.  His opinion.   He is not the editor in chief but one of the editors that works at NPR. And with your lack of curiosity you did not bother to get the rest of the story because it suited your purpose not to.  And that was to discredit NPR as a news agency.

And if you are not going to check both sides of a story don’t get pissy when someone else does.

A good analysis of why there can be no real conversation with conservatives. As long as even the formerly reasonable voices among them are denying the dangers of Trumpism in favor of making “the Left” the enemy, no conversation is possible. We do not accept the same reality.

thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/anti-anti-trump-conservatives-are

Biden might be old, but he's not talking in speeches about the "beautiful" side of the Battle of Gettysburg and favorably quoting noted traitor Robert E. Lee.

x.com/jimstewartson/status/1779311489033396614