Thread by @jimtankersley

So @bencasselman & my mentions have been a raging inferno the last 36 hrs, thanks to this story -- nytimes.com/2019/04/14/bus… -- (and the president who just read its headline, among others who shared it), and I actually think we can all learn something from the ashes. Thread. 1/

@bencasselman The story is about the wide disconnect between the # of Americans who got a tax cut this year from the 2017 Trump tax law, and the much smaller # who *think* they got a tax cut. It made people angry. 2/

@bencasselman The angry people fell, mostly, into a few large categories. Each of them tell us something about tax policy. Collectively, they maybe tell us Something Big about tax policy. 3/

@bencasselman One group basically said, No, I did not get a tax cut -- my refund went down! Or, I owed for the first time ever!

Another said, My rates may have gone down, but I lost deductions!

Another said, I live in a blue state, all of our federal taxes went up!

4/

@bencasselman Stats tell us most of the folks in those groups actually got a tax cut, compared to what they would have paid this yr under prior law. But no surprise, most ppl don't run elaborate counterfactuals on their taxes! And so they see refund size, or deductions avail, as tax proxies 5/

@bencasselman More on those groups later.

There's another set of groups that see the "did you get a tax cut" question through a more political lens. They include:

*Trump could not possibly have given me a tax cut
*The law was a giveaway to the rich (or big biz) it couldn't have helped me 6/

@bencasselman And then there was a more empirical version of those more political groups.

They boiled down to, I understand the stats, but the stats also show corps/the rich did much better than ppl like me, and that's what's important here, even if I got a tax cut. 7/

@bencasselman Same for the "but the tax cuts blew up the deficit, and thus, I assume the middle-class will have to repay them in the future" crew, which is small but important. 8/

@bencasselman What you see, in all of those groups, is a range of actual acceptance of the hard data -- which, again, show most Americans got a tax cut in Year 1. I'm a data guy, so I appreciate folks who at least concede those numbers, before saying, "but what really matters is.." 9/

@bencasselman But I'm also v sympathetic to folks who don't have the time or energy to run their own tax counterfactual. Folks who count on a refund -- to paraphrase Clark W. Griswold here -- as a part of their salary. I understand their shock. 10/

@bencasselman And I am sympathetic to the final group of critics, the fans of the law who are screaming at us that it's Our Fault (Ben and I speak for the MSM now, sorry, I don't make the rules) that folks don't understand the benefits. Because, well... 11/

@bencasselman ...along with repeated, detailed econ modeling of the law, we've done a lot of writing on how it has added to the deficit, and benefited some groups/cos more than others, and hurt *some* upper-income residents of high-tax areas. (Yes, SOME ppl got a tax hike)... 12/

@bencasselman Those are important stories about the law, too, along with the story showing ppl that, yep, the vast majority got a tax cut this year. It's a nuanced story. It's not often a neat partisan box. (Remind me which party cares abt the deficit rn, again?)... 13/

@bencasselman I think journalists, including myself but probably not Ben, could have done more to tell all that nuance in a sustained way over the last 18 mos. But we've tried.

Similarly, proponents of the law could have done more to explain how it actually affected ppl, good and bad. 14/

@bencasselman As my friend and competitor @RichardRubinDC says, Tax Reform is Hard. It would be great if we could all make it easier by telling nuanced stories about it. 15/

@bencasselman @RichardRubinDC This won't be the last big tax law passed in DC. The next one will be confusing too. My big takeaway from this tax season is: People are confused. I can't blame them, even as they burn my mentions to the ground. /fin