Urinal Spin: Top earners get much of Scott Walker cut but pay more in income tax
The Milwaukee Urinal / Sentinel outdoes itself with the spin on Walker's latest tax break for the wealthiest ...
Top earners get much of Scott Walker cut but pay more in income tax
Madison - The highest-income taxpayers getting the biggest chunk of Gov. Scott Walker's proposed tax cut are paying an even larger share of the overall income tax in Wisconsin, a Journal Sentinel review has found.
The newspaper's analysis shows how many angles there are to seemingly simple questions - who benefits the most from the two-year $332 million income tax cut proposal and why? To get a fuller picture, the newspaper looked at figures from the Legislature's nonpartisan budget office and consulted with other tax experts.
Here's the upshot: State projections show the top fifth of taxpayers - those making more than $100,000 a year - would receive just under half the benefits from the Republican governor's proposed tax cut in 2014.
But the flip side of that finding is that without Walker's proposal, those upper-income Wisconsin taxpayers would pay 61.2% of the total income tax in 2014, according to numbers from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
What the Urinal omits, of course, is that these "top earners" are taking home way more than 61.2% of the income, without even factoring in their capital gains.
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Since the paper no longer represents what's in the best interest of Milwaukee or Wisconsin, as a whole, shouldn't the name of the paper reflect that?
Can we start an online petition to ask that Journal Communications' owners re-name it to something more honest? The "Wisconsin Manufacturer's and Commerce Journal Sentinel" or the "Greater Milwaukee Committee Journal Sentinel" would be more accurate.
The real Masters of the Press make sure we end up with "fake Democrats" representing our best interests about as well as Vidkun Quisling represented the Norwegians.
Or these guys do, as spokespersons for the rest of the ordinary field hands on the plantation:
...It's getting to be over the top.
Yesterday, The "What We're Reading" / Best of the Blogs editorial page Gray Box
featured a few paragraphs from the Wit and Wisdom of one William Kristol. It was
exceptionally clueless sliming of Chuck Hegel, intended for the sort of audience
that still believes everything Ari Fleischer said was right, on the eve of the Iraq
invasion.
I went over the editorial board list at the top of the page. Who could possibly be
interested in anything Kristol would have had to say? On the same day that Hegel
actually got confirmed, when it was all water under the bridge. Ernst? Betsy? Haynes?
There was a fermented, sour-grapes smell wafting off of that page.
The only conclusion I could draw was that column inches devoted to material like
that (and similar but more entertaining propaganda such as Christian Schneider's
column) all comes from one and the same budget.
We don't really know whose, but wouldn't it be great if they disclosed it themselves,
and dropped all the pretenses?