A New York Post editorial tackles Democrats’ misinformation campaign about Trump tax cuts.
Say this for Democrats: They can be very effective — at least, when it comes to misleading Americans on taxes. That’s clear from the wide gap between the number of people who got tax cuts last year and the far smaller number who think they did.
As even The New York Times (yes, the anti-Trump Times) noted, Tax Policy Center figures show 65 percent of taxpayers got tax cuts last year, thanks to the 2017 Trump tax reforms; just 6 percent had to pay more.
Yet in early April, SurveyMonkey found only 40 percent of Americans believed they saw savings, and only 20 percent felt sure they had. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll last month found even fewer, just 17 percent, thought their families would pay less.
Why are so many people under the wrong impression about their own taxes? As the Times put it, the gap “appears to flow from a sustained — and misleading — effort by liberal opponents of the law to brand [Trump’s tax reform] as a broad middle-class tax increase.” Give the paper credit for honesty.
Fact is, “Democrats did a very good job” at convincing people they wouldn’t benefit, the Tax Policy Center’s Howard Gleckman observed. “The reality has been unable to break that perception.”
