The Times pretends to discuss that plan!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2012

At long last, Romney’s (well-hidden) proposal: With twelve days left in the campaign, the New York Times pretends to discuss the Romney tax proposal!

As part of this Potemkin newspaper’s ongoing undisguised comedy series, Annie Lowrey’s worthless report is hidden on page A4.

Too funny! It wasn’t even allowed to appear inside the Election or National sections! Readers might have spotted it there!

But anxious editors need have felt no alarm. If readers do stumble across this report, they will learn nothing especially troubling about this absurd tax proposal.

Submitting her term paper very late, Lowrey starts like this:

LOWREY (10/25/12): Tax Policy Center in Spotlight for Its Romney Study

A small nonpartisan research center operated by professed ''geeks'' has found itself at the center of a rancorous $5 trillion debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney.

No white paper or policy manifesto put out during the presidential campaign has proved more controversial than an August study by the Washington-based Tax Policy Center, a respected nonprofit that issues studiously detailed tax analyses.

Three months after its detailed report appeared, the Tax Policy Center reaches the headlines, hidden away on an unlikely page. But that headline, and Lowrey’s opening premises, are all plainly untrue.

The Tax Policy Center is not in the spotlight. For months, the New York Times has worked quite hard to keep it out of the light.

And that August 1 study has not “proved controversial.” Very few New York Times readers even know that the study exists.

Nor would those readers learn a great deal from Lowrey’s new pseudo-report. As she continues, the scribe politely says this:

LOWREY (continuing directly): That study found, in short, that Mr. Romney could not keep all of the promises he had made on individual tax reform: including cutting marginal tax rates by 20 percent, keeping protections for investment income, not widening the deficit and not increasing the tax burden on the poor or middle class. It concluded that Mr. Romney's plan, on its face, would cut taxes for rich families and raise them for everyone else.

Interesting! But how about this:

By how much would Romney’s plan raise taxes for everyone else? The study provided an unpleasant number. Lowrey and/or her editor has hidden that number away.

In early August, we screeched, yelled and hollered, insisting that our big news go beyond the slender reports they filed about this study. But the liberal world sat and diddled itself, clowning about Romney's horsey and dog, and the New York Times kept playing dumb.

Today, the Times pretends to present a report about a “controversial” study. But the Times is still hiding that study’s contents. And the “controversy” to which Lowrey refers was killed in the crib by the Times.

All summer, the children gamboled and played. Today, the Times laughs in your faces.

Also not mentioned: As best we can tell, the New York Times still hasn’t ever reported the findings of that second reputable study—the study which says that Romney’s proposed cut in tax rates is off by a factor of five.

The study was discussed in an editorial. Never in a news report!

Also this:

In her report, Lowrey doesn’t mention Romney’s proposal to kill the estate tax altogether. But then, that proposal has barely been mentioned in New York Times news reporting.

Most readers of the Times don't know the proposal exists. A conspiracy theorist might even say this: Trillionaire owners of big famous newspapers may want the estate tax to lapse!

Crazy thoughts like these start floating around when the New York Times only pretends to report Mitt Romney’s ridiculous tax “plan.”

We've borrowed the language of glorious Cather: Protecting the memory of her vibrant immigrant girls in the pages of My Antonia:

CATHER (page 201): The country girls were considered a menace to the social order. Their beauty shone out too brightly against a conventional background. But anxious mothers need have felt no alarm. They mistook the mettle of their sons. The respect for respectability was stronger than any desire in Black Hawk youth.

In Cather's account, young Black Hawk men could see the beauty of the immigrant girls. But they were too timid to act.