Amid Major Struggles for Newspapers, a Washington Post Columnist Is Tone Deaf
“It’s painful – there’s a knot in my gut to see what we built up over time torn down in this relentless way.” Those are the words of longtime newspaperman Greg Moore, about the ongoing struggles of The Denver Post.
Moore edited the newspaper from 2002 to 2016, and he was talking to the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan about the latest round of layoffs at the formerly prosperous newspaper. While Denver’s Post and its now defunct former rival (Rocky Mountain News) once combined for over 600 journalists, the Post now has under 70 people in its newsroom after another 30 layoffs last week. As anyone who is part of the business of print or online media can attest, these depressing stories are increasingly common.
Which brings us to a column by Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell that was run the same day as Sullivan’s story. Rampell’s piece was about the recent Republican tax cuts. And while Republicans and Rampell well overstate how large they are, readers can rest assured that there’s a relationship between tax rates and the sad Denver Post story.
In Rampell’s case, readers familiar with her can likely imagine that she’s against the GOP tax cuts for the typical reasons that most on the left are. They’re among other things a “massive upward redistribution of wealth,” and worse, according to Rampell, they’re a raid of “$1.5 trillion from the Treasury.”
Interesting about the alleged raid from Treasury is that six lines later Rampell contradicted herself. Still ranting about the “ginormous, sloppily drafted” tax cuts, she added that they’re “deficit-financed.” Ok, but if deficit-financed they in no way amount to a raid on the U.S. Treasury. By Rampell’s very own admission, the money isn’t there. Getting right to the point, governments have no resources. The not-so-significant tax cuts are not a signal that Treasury will hand out $1.5 trillion over time. It has no money to write checks with absent you, me, Rampell and every other individual that Treasury has a claim on. The too-small tax cuts at best mean that Treasury will collect $1.5 trillion less over time. But that’s a digression.
The main thing is that Rampell dislikes the tax cuts for them allegedly favoring the rich. Who cares that the rich are densest in California and New York, and in both states the richest will pay more in federal taxes. Rampell is mad that some with means will get to keep more of what they earn. Still, it requires stress that Treasury is not handing out $1.5 trillion as much as GOP tax-shuffling (what was way too small shouldn’t be referred to as a “cut”) means more of the wealth always and everywhere created in the private sector will stay there. Rampell’s anger is magnified given her assertion that “we are already on track to have a trillion-dollar deficit this year, thanks to the recently passed tax law and additional spending increases.”
So Rampell hates deficits. If so, she should contact some of her fellow Princetonians who sell or trade bonds on Wall Street. What they’ll reveal to her might be eye-opening. In particular, they’ll tell her that buyers of bonds are buying future income streams. Think about that for a minute. Bonds are once again a claim on future income streams.
The above in mind, and fully assuming Rampell’s static view of the revenue impact of tax cuts, the Washington Post columnist should be calling for much bigger tax cuts for every single American. Rampell is a deficit hawk, and as such she is unwittingly acknowledging that she’d like Treasury to collect much less in taxes. If so, the deficits that allegedly keep her up at night will paradoxically vanish. The nature of bonds tells us investors aren’t going to so readily buy claims on future Treasury inflows if the expectation is that Trump et al are actually cutting taxes. Buyers of bonds want to be paid back, and it’s precisely because Treasury revenues are so abundant that it can borrow so much. The deficits that have her so worried are an effect of a government that is the recipient of far too much in the way of revenues.
An irony about Rampell’s disdain for tax cuts that allegedly benefit the rich is that the Post columnist has never known a world not defined by endless generosity from the rich; at least in her adult life. To walk Princeton’s stunningly beautiful campus is to see what happens to a school that has benefited from centuries of donations care of the rich, and superrich. Since graduation, Rampell’s obvious talents have taken her to the New York Times (propped up by billionaire Carlos Slim), and then on to the Washington Post. Its newsroom was similarly hollowed out until the richest man in the world purchased the newspaper, only to revive it with his bottomless fortune. In short, Rampell can turn her nose up to tax measures that allegedly benefit the rich simply because she’s never known what it’s like to not have billionaire and centimillionaire benefactors.
Back to the tax cuts that truly anger Rampell, what an odd thing. Billionaires once again saved the New York Times and Washington Post, yet she decries tax cuts for those with the most money? Logic dictates that as a certain beneficiary of those she deems “plutocratic,” Rampell would want to see them keep as much of the fruits of their production as possible. But as she sees it about tax cuts, more of them would amount to throwing “more good money after bad.” She can’t mean that! If not for the superrich it’s fair to say that the New York Times and Washington Post would still exist, but not in their present, rather robust form. Furthermore, Rampell surely knows about the endless waste in Washington. Absent it, think how much more talent could be matched with capital, how many promising concepts could be turned into businesses, and yes, how many more newspapers could be saved.
Indeed, if we accept Rampell’s admittedly naïve description of the GOP tax cuts as a “massive upward redistribution of wealth,” what she’s saying is that the more that Republicans reduce tax rates, the more wealth that will stay in the private sector. By Rampell’s own admission, much of this will be concentrated in the hands of the rich. Implicitly she’s admitting that the result will be more billionaires. If so, good. And good for media; print and online. Media is a risky bet right now, and because it is, the space needs investors with the capacity to potentially lose major sums of money on a sector that is presently in trouble.
Rampell might understand the above better if she had better knowledge of how the proverbial other half lives. While big names like the Times, Post and Los Angeles Times have all been protected by billionaires in the 21st century, the lesser newspapers, the smaller ones, or shall we say the unequal ones are struggling. Big time.
Back to the Denver Post, a still employed reporter relayed to Rampell’s Washington Post colleague Sullivan that there were “Sobs, gasps [and] expletives” when the awful news about the layoffs was relayed last week. The Denver Post, and countless other newspapers like it, need billionaires to revive their sagging fortunes. The good news is that an influential editorialist and beneficiary of abundant wealth at the Washington Post intimately knows what the Denver Post and others need to reverse their declines.
Unknown is if Rampell can look beyond her odd dislike of that which benefits the rich in order to state the obvious. Here’s hoping she will. Until then, her rants against “ginormous” tax cuts for top earners sound like the musings of someone fortunate enough to have long been insulated from work's terrors by massive wealth that was luckily not taxed away. To be blunt, Rampell’s dislike of tax cuts for the rich is surely tone deaf in consideration of the major struggles within the media space she’s lucky enough to still be a part of.
