THE ERA WHICH WAS: When DJT paid the AMT!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2020

The NYT's sleight of hand: Walter Cronkite wasn't crazy. Neither was David Brinkley.

In 1965, Cronkite anchored the CBS Evening News. Huntley co-anchored NBC's evening news program, The Huntley-Brinkley Report.

Brinkley's co-anchor was Chet Huntley. He didn't seem to be crazy either. None of these fellows did.

In 1963, these network news programs had been expanded from 15 to 30 minutes per night. Essentially, this was all a person could watch when it came to TV news. 

In short, there wasn't a lot of TV news in 1965. Even better, the people who anchored these nightly news programs didn't seem to be crazy. 

You rarely saw them make crazy statements. We're not sure they ever did!

In truth, it was hard to hear crazy statements in 1965. Our current era, The Era Which Was, hadn't quite started yet.

That said, talk radio was starting in San Francisco, not far from where we were finishing high school.  If memory serves, a bit of the Crazy actually was starting to show up there as Les Crane, and then Ira Blue, screamed and yelled at their callers.

(Crane would even slam the phone down on his callers. It was like talking to NAME WITHHELD at the Washington Post!)

We recall being puzzled by the turn toward the loud, the opinionated and the crazy on those KGO programs. That was largely because there hadn't been a lot of crazy around before that.

In 1965, it was actually hard to hear crazy statements. If you wanted to hear one version of the Crazy, you had to send away to the John Birch Society. After that, you'd have to wait until they mailed you back. 

In the meantime, there were Cronkite, Brinkley and Huntley. They delivered their half-hour news reports. That wasn't just the way it was, that was also all there was.

Today, thanks to new technologies, the Crazy is everywhere. And not only that! The Crazy is everywhere  on a 24-hour basis. 

Some of the crazy, or the selective, or the misleading or flatly inaccurate comes from organized corporate  sources. Talk radio, cable TV and the Internet are sources of the crazy or wrong on a round-the-clock basis.

That said, a large amount of the misleading or bogus now comes to us from regular people. "Social media" makes this possible. On occasion, Putin joins in!

The Crazy is everywhere today, and we humans are lacking in basic discernment. It's also true that our biggest journalistic stars may not always be well informed or fully cogent.

Yesterday morning, at 6 A.M., we were watching Morning Joe. We'd quit the show within the last year, so ridiculous had it become. Yesterday, we wondered how Joe would handle the bombshell report about the commander's taxes.

The program opened with videotape of Donald J. Trump saying that he does pay taxes. Also, that the New York Times' giant front-page report was "fake news." 

As he's done for six years, Trump said he'd release his tax returns once the IRS audit was done. 

"The IRS doesn't treat me well," the commander in chief complained. Then, Joe and Mika said this:

JOE (9/28/20): You know, he's actually right, Mika. He does pay taxes He—I think, what was it, last year, he paid $750 in taxes?

MIKA: Yeah.

JOE: Ten out of 15 years he paid zero percent in taxes? Think actually of the nurses who paid more in federal income taxes than Donald Trump over the last decade. Think of all the construction workers...

As everyone else on the planet knew, the celebrities had it wrong. Below, you see paragraphs 1, 2 and 5 of the bombshell report the stars were now discussing:

BUETTNER ET AL (9/28/20): Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years—largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

[...]

The New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office. It does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019. 

The lengthy report doesn't cover Trump's tax payments from "last year." On Sunday evening, we'd watched several hours of pundit discussions which made this basic point clear.

The Times report doesn't cover Trump's taxes from last year. Now it was Monday morning, and Joe and Mika didn't seem to know that. 

Their error doesn't make any difference; at this point, nothing does. But Joe and Mika are seven- or eight-figure TV stars, and they literally didn't know the first thing about the Times report.

This doesn't qualify as the Crazy, although this sort of thing does help nudge the Crazy along. 

Yesterday afternoon and evening, we were puzzled as various TV pundits offered dueling capsule accounts of what the Times had reported.

Some pundits said that Donald K. Trump had paid no income taxes in 10 of the 17 years on which the Times was reporting. Others said he had paid no income taxes in 11 of 18 years.

We're still not entirely sure where the eighteenth year comes from (more to follow). We saw no one stop to explain.

That isn't the Crazy either. It simply represents the culture of round-the-clock TV news.

Might we state the obvious? "Cable news" would be much more competent if it didn't create so much product. 

The same might be said of opinion columns. Consider Bret Stephens's column in this morning's New York Times.

Why do Trump voters vote for Trump? That strikes us as a very important question.

It's also true that there's no easy way to answer any such question. Today, Stephens reports his interview with one Trump voter, a gay woman in New York City who's a registered Democrat.

According to Stephens, "she was enthusiastic for Bernie Sanders in 2016" but will vote for Trump this year. Stephens reports her reasons for favoring Trump, failing to note that some of her statements make little sense on a purely factual basis.

(We'd be less dismissive of some of her views make perfect sense. For example, we share her view that Biden-Harris is a weak ticket.)

Do Democrats have something to learn from this one voter, who Stephens describes as an "outlier?" Almost surely, the answer is yes, but Stephens makes no attempt to say what it is.

We'd like to see our favorite stars speak to more Trump voters. Even so, it seemed to us that Stephens was phoning it in.

That doesn't qualify as the Crazy, just as the not super-sharp. That said, let's return to the basic claim made in the New York Times news report. As we do, let's ponder a possible sleight of hand within the the lengthy report.

Below, you see paragraphs three million and three million and one from the ten million paragraph report. Assuming the highlighted statements are accurate, they seem to undermine what the Times said way up in paragraph 5:

BUETTNER: Mr. Trump was periodically required to pay a parallel income tax called the alternative minimum tax, created as a tripwire to prevent wealthy people from using huge deductions, including business losses, to entirely wipe out their tax liabilities.

Mr. Trump paid alternative minimum tax in seven years between 2000 and 2017—a total of $24.3 million, excluding refunds he received after filing.

For the record, Buettner seems to be speaking about eighteen years in that passage, rather than seventeen. Elsewhere, he seems to say that the Times examined new data for eighteen years, including the year 2000.

("The Times examined and analyzed the data from thousands of individual and business tax returns for 2000 through 2017, along with additional tax information from other years.")

How many new years of data did the Times obtain? You'd almost think that financial journalists could keep such matters straight. 

Much more significantly, consider what Buettner says about the AMT—the alternative minimum tax.

As Buettner notes, the AMT was created as a type of substitute for the federal income tax.  If, under the tax code's welter of rules, an individual ended up owing no income tax, he would have to pay the AMT instead.

Sad! According to the Times, in seven years when Trump "paid no income tax," he did make AMT submissions—and those submissions totaled slightly more than $24 million. 

During those seven years, Trump averaged $3.5 million per year in AMT submissions. Did we mention the fact that the AMT was designed as an alternate form of—as a substitute or replacement for—the federal income tax?

During seven of the years in question, Trump paid no "income tax"—but he paid an average of $3.5 million in the alternative minimum tax! Journalistically, that has to be an all-time example of a "distinction without a difference." 

Sadly, it seems to leave us with only three years when the commander paid no income tax. Let's review the basic concepts:

The T in AMT does in fact stand for "tax." (The A stands for "alternative.") 

In other words, the AMT was designed as an alternative form of the income tax. It takes the place of the income tax when, under the rules of the game, no "income tax" is owed.

Yesterday morning, Joe and Mika (literally) didn't know the first thing the Times had said. Beyond that, it's hard to tell if the new data the Times acquired covers seventeen or eighteen years.

That's fairly minor stuff. The kicker would be this:

At some point, Stephens' outlier Trump supporter is going to hear about the way the New York Times glossed the role of the alternative minimum tax. 

She'll be told that the Times was selling fake news about the commander. Are we sure that claim will be inaccurate?

The Crazy starts to arrive on the scene when various people stop listening to people like Cronkite and Brinkley. When they decide that it makes no sense to credit the New York Times.

It seems to us that the Times report involved some sleight of hand. Did Cronkite and Brinkley ever do that?

Before The Era Which Was took shape, very few people thought that!

Again with what Joe said: Again, here's what Joe said:

JOE (9/28/20): You know, he's actually right, Mika. He does pay taxes He—I think, what was it, last year, he paid $750 in taxes?

MIKA: Yeah.

JOE: Ten out of 15 years he paid zero percent in taxes? Think actually of the nurses who paid more in federal income taxes than Donald Trump over the last decade. 

Oof! In seven of those ten years, Trump "paid zero percent in taxes" unless you count the millions he paid in that alternative tax!

Those nurses did pay more than Trump in "federal income taxes." But he paid millions more than they did in that alternative tax.

Absent further explanation, this strikes us as sleight of hand. Could a sensible person possibly say that this is slightly "fake?"