In today’s Los Angeles Times, you’ll see the following headline:

“Angelelides Proposes Tax Cuts”

and just below it this text:

“He hopes to reinvigorate his run for governor with the $1.4-billion proposal, which would mostly benefit middle-class residents.”

The “tax cut” is the dominant story on page 1 of the California Section.

Hoo-ray. In this state of far-too-high taxes, maybe this guy is sort of getting with the times.

No way.

It turns out that the LAT simply buried the true story of the Angelides tax plan back on page B7. My guess is that the majority of LAT readers will never make it to B7 and thus will miss out on the real story. [Blogger Patterico has called the LAT out on this tactic of burying context many times–referring to it as “below the fold”].

Continuing on to B7, the LAT editors again refrain the headline: “Angelides Calls for $1.4-Billion in Tax Cuts” and they even reference the speech he gave as his “tax-cut speech”.

Only after wading through two tax cut headlines and numerous other misleading statements do we finally see the details of the tax plan:

Annual tax cuts:
$1.4 billion

Annual tax increases:
$5.1 billion

Yes, Angelides big tax cut is actually a $3.7 billion tax increase.

Misleading? You bet.

The LAT could have written this story any number of ways. For example, “Angelides tempers proposed tax increases with middle class tax relief”. Instead, the editors chose to ignore the sensitivity of over-taxed Californians and pander to the Angelides gubernatorial campaign.

Think we’re splitting hairs? How would a sports fan react to a front page headline that implied a Dodger victory only to have to turn to page 7 to learn it was actually a loss? Or a Business Section story like “Stocks Soar on Strong Earnings Report” only to qualify it later in the paper that the market still ended up down 150 points because of inflation fears. The point is that the editors are smart enough to avoid misleading headlines in every aspect of the paper except when it comes to stories that go against their political bent. That’s called media bias.

Given how the LAT treated Schwarzenegger during his election and afterward and their treatment of Steve Westly’s campaign more recently, we shouldn’t be surprised.

Further reading: the Times has used this fuzzy math before. Remember the nursing “cut“?

Even more to the point, shouldn’t the Times being doing just a little analysis on how successful these “tax the rich” plans really are? Such as this:

(A 2000 study) by Jonathan Gruber (of MIT) and Emmanuel Saez (UC Berkeley) found an average elasticity of 0.4, which they think is about the mid-point of recent study results. Therefore, a tax cut creating a 10-percent increase in the after-tax share on marginal income will result in a 4-percent increase in taxable income. Gruber and Saez found substantially larger elasticities at higher incomes, indicating that the largest efficiency gains come from cutting the top tax rates.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 17th, 2006 at 8:57 am by Insider and is filed under Los Angeles Times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.