Victor Fleischer (San Diego) delivers the keynote address on The State of Our Tax Institutions today at the annual USC Tax Institute:
The rules of the game have changed. More than ever, ideology drives tax policy at the expense of evidence, reason, expert advice, or specialized knowledge. This Essay examines the performance of our various tax institutions in the year leading up to the passage of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017. The state of our tax institutions is not good.
Real-time dissecting of his every word
Armies of fact-checkers massed around the State of the Union
Address, seeking to evacuate truth from the encroaching rhetorical perils of Donald Trump.
We'll now see if they slowed the perilous advance of his exaggerations and
outright falsehoods.
As Trump spoke for nearly 90 minutes, with Vice President Mike Pence and
House Speaker Paul
Ryan sitting behind him and serving as the traditional nodding
bobbleheads, a notable partnership of The Washington Post, PolitiFact and
FaceCheck.org combined for a running dissection of Trump statements.
What's called FactStream was under the aegis of the Duke
University Reporters' Lab. As if one needed to underscore the challenge it and
other fact-checkers face, one right-leaning site had already preemptively
inveighed against "Liberal
Foundations Behind State of the Union Fact-Checking."
At 8:18 p.m. (Central time) came this from the truth-seekers:
"Donald Trump:
Since the election, we have created 2.4 million new jobs. Our Quick Take: In
Trump's first 11 months, employment increased by 1.84 million — 12% lower than
the 2 million jobs that were created the previous 11 months."
At 8:22: "Donald
Trump: We enacted the biggest tax cuts and reform in American
history. Our
Quick Take: It is not the biggest tax cut. It is the 8th
largest cut since 1918 as a percentage of gross domestic product, and the 4th
largest in inflation-adjusted dollars."
In obvious ways, the hour-long instant analysis was remarkable
in its speed and sophisticated concision. I thought back to sitting in the
House of Representatives for many State of the Unions, in the balcony above the
rostrum, a paper copy of speech in hand, jotting notes in margins, underlining
phrases, sticking question marks here and there. And waiting to make calls
later at the office, perhaps assisted by an Associated Press analysis of
certain claims.
Now a confluence of forces — most accelerated by Trump's
pugilistic battle with veracity — prompts new systems melding journalists and
technology. There's no need to wait hours until morning newspaper editions, or
initial wire service stories. Cadres of single-minded analysts are in place,
unleashed on every presidential declaration.
For sure, this was never likely to be a Trumpian atrocity, and
it was not. Dozens in the White House and across multiple Cabinet departments
typically vet the State of the Union Address. The new armies will be better off
dissecting spontaneous Trump tweets and interviews in coming days, as
underscored in the eviscerations by Stephen
Colbert and others of his most recent unbridled interview, in
Davos, Switzerland, with bombastic British talk show host Piers Morgan.
"This speech was way too pre-filtered for fact-checking to
play an important early role in its analysis. MSNBC did a fact check segment
at 8:50 pm. They make a few good points, but they’re not really
helpful in assessing the speech," said Bruno Cohen, a retired broadcast
network executive who ran major network stations.
"Trump’s writers managed to keep him on task — i.e. reach
for some form of unity. The truly divisive stuff was minimized. Only a
short mention of the wall. No attacks on the press. But, of course, he couldn’t
help himself — and so we get the lines like standing for the national
anthem."
But there remained grist for the new candor-driven mills now
personified by the rollout of FactStream. Had Trump eliminated, as he
claimed, more regulations in just a year than any administration in history?
Well, not necessarily.
Have 3 million workers received tax cut bonuses? Yes, "with
most getting $1,000 or less," said the Duke trio. That construction (as
opposed to perhaps saying "nearly $1,000") might prompt an inference
that it constitutes small potatoes. Many Americans, if not the same elite
journalists who by and large missed the partly economics-driven unrest
propelling Trump's stunning election victory, would surely dispute that.
Had the Empire State Building been constructed in one year?
Well, no, it was actually 13 months, but that check seemed a difference without
a real distinction. Is Diversity Visa a program that randomly distributes green
cards without regard for skill? Not quite since, among green cardholders, a
high percentage hold professional jobs and have a low unemployment
rate.
Had Trump quickly responded when street protests broke out in
Iran against the government? True, said the trio; the administration
quickly and strongly condemned the arrests of protesters.
The impact? It might be negligible, given these ideologically
charged times and the paucity of the beyond-the-pale sentiments that can be
uttered by Trump. One was reminded early of those as Trump entered the chamber
and shook hands, with at least superficially mutual conviviality, with
Illinois Sen. Dick
Durbin, who was at the famous "shithole countries"
meeting and was unrelenting in his subsequent derision of Trump.
It is thus also worthy of note that, as FactStream did its
thing, the White House press office was cranking out its own stream of press
releases on multiple Trump statements with divergent, supporting arguments.
It does, one is reminded, still have a pretty big megaphone as
it seeks to drown out the dissonant refrains of the fact checkers in a time of
unsettlingly low approval ratings for the press. And, of course, one watched
the speech and inspected the fact-checks while confronting a likelihood
nicely distilled by Peter
Hamby in Vanity Fair.
Nothing that Trump
would say would be as memorable as one of many Trump tweets. He's probably
right: Even more in the Age of Trump, an increasingly inconsequential ritual is
even more hollow. Dissections, no matter how well-intentioned and
accurate, may go for naught.
National Academies of Sciences and Engineering: “Since 2009, we’ve taken the transcript of the State of the Union and added in publications relevant to the President’s speech. It’s our way of spotlighting our work: providing independent, evidence-based research that addresses the wide variety of challenges and goals of our country and beyond. Below, you’ll find the transcript of last night’s State of the Union from whitehouse.gov with our publications inline…”
And a bonus fact – So many people visited fact-checking website PolitiFact during the State of the Union, it crashed
Data Driven Journalism – Mahima Singh is a data journalist at the Palm Beach Post in South Florida – Link to full text of this article: “Donald Trump’s relationship with the media has been a constant tug of war. Even before he became the President of the United States, the collective opinion about him in news kept shifting. While today the sentiment in the mainstream media seems overly negative towards Trump, a year ago it was less polarized. The idea – In 2016, as I read news about the president’s campaign, his election and then his inauguration, I felt that there was a sudden shift in the way news media was talking about Trump, especially during the lead up to his inauguration and the first few weeks of his presidency. I wanted to see if data could prove my hypothesis that there was a shift in news sentiment towards Trump before and after his inauguration. For the final project of our natural language processing class at Syracuse University, Daniela Fernández Espinosa from the Information School, James Troncale from the Linguistics Department and I, built a prototype sentiment analyzer to help political figures make better media strategy plans. I visualized the results of that project and hosted it on my GitHub. Text analysis There have been multiple sentiment analysis done on Trump’s social media posts. While these projects make the news and garner online attention, few analyses have looked at the media itself. During the presidential campaign in 2016, Data Face ran a text analysis on news articles about Trump and Clinton. The results gained a lot of media attention and steered conversations. I planned to follow a similar approach…”
Bipartisan, unifying?
No sooner had President Trump
concluded than the cascade of analysis began — dozens and dozens of voices.
Chris Wallace of
Fox News didn't buy the pre-speech spin — and there is always White House
pre-speech spin that proves to be largely baloney — about a bipartisan speech
and found Trump offering Democrats various deals "he knew they couldn't
accept."
And Fox's Megyn Kelly —
wait, she's on NBC now and was a member of a secondary MSNBC panel that
included NBC eminence grise Tom
Brokaw — opined that if Trump gets billions for his
wall, that will inevitably help him politically. The substance of the claim
seemed less telling than the ancillary role she played compared to days of
big event stardom at the House that Ailes Built.
If only NBC had inserted Jane Fonda next
to her for Round 2 (or is it Round 3?) of their duel, so far most
vividly marked by Kelly's gratuitous shots at a figure whose cultural
impact she can only dream of replicating. On this night, Kelly was a bit
player lost amid the strong first-team and bench of new colleagues.
|
The new post-speech analyses
The old way of doing business was
personified by CNN, whose production structure can make it difficult to
watch, with too many people talking, too many panels, no one person seemingly
in charge (though
Anderson Cooper does try), no cohesive approach. Once again,
there were far too many people on the set competing for time, as if this
were a U.N. General Assembly meeting. Why not just take a few people —
including Jake
Tapper, John
King and David
Axelrod, among others — and focus on their takes? The
few really informative moments included Tapper's interview of California Sen.
Kamala Harris,
touching on Black Caucus reaction and what's up in the Senate Intelligence
Committee
If you had doubts about the new media
competition, you just had to turn to Stephen
Colbert's show, which is usually taped in late
afternoon-early evening, and Comedy Central, which both had live shows.
Colbert's effort was especially impressive in quickly and satirically
editing speech video to mock Trump, then his mocking it all in a seamless
monologue that came off as if meticulously rehearsed multiple times. Even for
a professional stand-up comic, this error-free performance was rapier
sharp and impressive.
One of many examples came as he
showed Trump noting some of the natural disasters experienced in the past
year, notably "floods, fires and storms." Colbert then declared,
"And Stormys. Don't forget her. She was one of the most expensive disasters
for you, personally."
When a former Obama
speechwriter-guest later noted the plodding delivery of the 5,000-plus
words, Colbert noted Trump seemingly slowing down near the end. "It
seemed like somebody should pull the string in his back one more time."
|
The Morning Babel (State of Union edition)
"Trump & Friends" was ebullient, hailing a
justifiable "victory lap" taken by Trump in the address, intoned Ainsley Earhardt,
and could be summed up thus: "America, America, America." It wasn't
just a laundry list, said her colleague Steve
Doocy, "but last night we heard so much about the people
and it was so interesting."
CNN's "New Day" conceded the speech was "for him
well delivered" and that he will continue to be "unpredictable and
impetuous," as Chris
Cillizza put it in a succinct reflection of the overriding
conventional wisdom on Trump himself.
And "Morning Joe" on MSNBC pivoted quickly from the
speech — seemingly realizing it didn't really provide the usual Trump outrages
— to the show's recent red meat of wayward Republicans, notably the House
Intelligence Committee voting to reveal a classified memo.
"It's just
disgraceful," said analyst John
Heilemann. "This is so mind-boggling, what the Republicans
are doing," interjected Joe
Scarborough. Everybody on set agreed. Quelle surprise, as
the French would say. It then broke for commercials, including ones for
Cadillac, "The Shape of Water" and, yes, Trump's impeachment as
urged by Tom
Steyer, a billionaire hedge fund manager and environmental
activist. Politics and commerce melded neatly only minutes after the sun
rose in the East. |
Richard Engel's toughest story
Richard Engel,
a terrific and nervy NBC reporter, was covering the North Korea
missile mess last fall, embedded with South Korean troops, when he
was contacted by his 2-year-old son Henry's doctor and informed of the
explanation for some developmental challenges. Genetic testing showed
Rett Syndrome, a rare and pretty awful disorder that guarantees significant
physical and cognitive impairments.
Engel, 44, and his wife, Mary,
realized, “My son is probably not going to walk, probably not going to
speak, probably not going to have any mental capacity beyond the level of a
2-year-old,” as he tells People magazine in an upcoming story. Imagine
returning to your seat in a convoy after that news, even if the saga involves
a dictator with dangerous weapons dueling with a mercurial U.S. president.
“It was the middle of the night, and
the public affairs officer was talking to keep us awake, telling us about her
son joining the football team, and taking the SATs. I was thinking,
‘There’s going to be no football team. There’s going to be no SATs.’ I
started to really mourn the future I thought we were going to have with
Henry.”
A genetic draw has dealt them an
awful card. You may know people in a similar situation. We should think about
those cases more often. I was pissed at a bunch of ultimately insignificant
matters yesterday when an NBC publicist brought this tale to my attention.
I realized how damn lucky I am.
If you do want to reach out to Engel,
or just learn more about the topic, go here. And
next time you see one of his inevitably solid reports, you might just
consider his incredible challenge in compartmentalizing so much personal
pain.
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