Now that Team Red has demonstrated their utter hackery by suddenly changing their minds about dismantling the government-controlled health insurance system and demonstrating their deep and abiding love for expansive government, the next ripe target is so-called “tax reform.” Team Blue is already manning the ramparts in the certain fear that any adjustments in the tax code will be away from their moneybags and toward the Team Red moneybags (we know for certain that actually cutting taxes and pushing all the moneybags away from the trough is as likely as the sudden heat death of the Universe).

So it was with that thought in mind that I approached a Vox article written by the reliably mendacious Matt Yglesias as a general hit-piece on Trump. The article doesn’t disappoint, it was the expected (and at this point yawn-inducing) brew. The section on taxes drew my attention: as expected, the well-past-damn-lies use of statistics, cherry-picked quotes, emotional appeals, and the Diana Moon Glampers view of the purpose of economic manipulation.

Back on the policy front, Trump says of his tax plan that “if you add what the people are going to save in the middle income brackets, if you add that to what they’re saving with health care, this is like a windfall for the country, for the people.”

Trump’s actual tax plan would raise taxes on millions of Americans while delivering a windfall to the rich…

According to the Tax Policy Center, the average American family would see its after-tax income rise by about $760, while families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution would see their incomes rise by about $175,000 — more than triple the total household income of the median American. Trump’s plan also features a big corporate tax cut.

 

Now, being the sort of suspicious and cynical guy that I am, and admittedly not a news junkie, I wondered if the part about “would raise taxes on millions of Americans” was complete bullshit, the usual dishonest conflation of “tax rates” with “taxes,” or even “millions of Americans” being people in the dreaded 1%. So I followed the links to the source, the Tax Policy Center, which according to Wikipedia is “non-partisan.” From the article:

Without those revenue-raisers, nearly all US households would get a tax reduction, averaging about $4,400. The tax cuts would be highly regressive, with high income households getting much more than those with low- or middle-incomes. However, if a half-dozen tax hikes are included in a revenue package, the average tax cut would shrink to about $2,300 and about one-in-five households would pay more tax than under current law.

OK, this was the expected mendaciousness- the tax cuts are significant, and surprise surprise! the folks who pay more taxes get proportionately more reduction (i.e., the rate would be the same or smaller, but applied against a larger number). I guess that’s what they mean by “regressive.”

It was the very next several paragraphs which floored me:

TPC could not model an actual Trump tax plan since far too many critical details are unknown. For instance, the Administration has been sending mixed signals about whether it wants a tax bill to raise as much revenue as current law or whether it prefers a version that reduces overall taxes and add to the deficit.

Beyond those threshold questions, the White House outline left out many critical details. For instance, during the campaign, candidate Trump said he’d increase the standard deduction but eliminate both the personal exemption and head of household filing status. The April outline repeated the promise to boost the standard deduction but was silent on the two revenue-raisers.

In other words, “We have no idea of what the plan we’re criticizing actually is.” But it gets better:

As a result, TPC created a stylized version of what the key elements of a Trump plan might look like. It first analyzed the tax cuts that the White House outlined in April, adding key assumptions to fill in unspecified details. For instance, TPC assigned income ranges to the proposed tax brackets, which the Administration did not.

In other words, WE JUST MADE THIS SHIT UP OURSELVES. And THAT was what got cited, and Yglesias still had to apply the usual lying sack of shit spin and misquotation to it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Journalism Circa 2017.