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WASHINGTON — The GOP’s overhaul of the tax system — with results that won’t fully be known for years to come — is fueling some of both parties’ most misleading campaign claims of the 2018 election, according to the independent analysts at PolitiFact.
Senior correspondent Louis Jacobson and executive director Aaron Sharockman joined this week’s episode of Beyond the Bubble to unpack the midterms’ biggest doozies, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s claim that the tax bill resulted in “federal tax revenues” that “have gone up.”
“If you compare the two years, fiscal 2017 and fiscal 2018, factoring in some of the important contextual factors, like say, inflation, it actually fell from year to year,” said Jacobson, who rated Cruz’s statement from a debate with Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke “half true.”
“This is clearly a talking point that Republicans are using saying the tax cut is working, but the data doesn’t really support it, and we don’t really have enough data to make a totally informed analysis,” said Sharockman.
Politifact also vetted a claim by Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin, and repeated by other Democrats across the country, suggesting that 83 percent of the law’s benefits go to big corporations and the top one percent of the nation’s most wealthy people.
“What it boils down to is that the impact of the tax law on the average taxpayer is fairly generous in the early years, and then fairly regressive… in other words a much better deal for the richest taxpayers, about 10 years out,” said Jacobson.
“Democrats can point to all these scary percentages where the rich get all the tax revenues… about 10 years down the road, and the Republicans can say ‘Hey, look next year you guys are going to save some money,’ and they both have a point,” he added.
Jacobson wrote about the tax law throughout its passage at the end of 2017.
He and Sharockman beefed up their staff for the first midterm of Donald Trump’s presidency, allowing them to cover 18 competitive congressional races.
“I’m certainly seeing a lot more news organizations kind of putting things to their own truth tests, helping people understand what’s right or wrong,” said Sharockman.
“I think PoltiFact, fact-checkers and national media organizations have actually kinda really learned the lessons from elections past and are much better equipped to call out falsehoods,” he added.
McClatchy’s Beyond the Bubble show is produced by Jordan-Marie Smith and Davin Coburn. Alex Roarty, a national political correspondent for McClatchy, and Andrea Drusch, Washington correspondent for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, recorded this episode at McClatchy’s Washington Bureau, October 30, 2018.