This week on CounterSpin: Taxes, particularly income taxes, have a special role in US media parlance: Vitally important but endlessly, and instrumentally, fungible. “Taxpayer dollars” are sacrosanct; we need to think very hard, every time it comes up, about how best to dedicate them: Do food stamps or public education make the cut? But then, who contributes to this oh-so-important resource? Because at the same time, corporate media suggest the “Tax Man” is a villain, who pretty much steals your “hard-earned dollars”—so, wink wink, smart people avoid paying taxes as much as possible.
The between-the-lines upshot seems to be: The country runs on taxation, but if you have a lot to give, well then, you’ve earned the right to opt out. This weird, incoherent presentation is reaching some sort of flameout with the New York Times‘ much-anticipated and fought-for reporting on Donald Trump’s tax returns—and the political and pundit scramble to define or interpret them—in ways that (it’s seeming like) might indict Trump, without calling into deep question the enabling system around him that media’s corporate owners and sponsors, protestations aside, endorse. It makes things a bit harder to parse for regular folks. But not impossible. We’ll talk about takeaways from Trump’s taxes with Steve Wamhoff, director of federal tax policy at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at the first presidential debate.
Featured image: President Donald Trump in 2017 as photographed by political photographer Michael Vadon.
