NY Times Misleads On Trump Tax Cuts

In what has become an all to common occurrence at the New York Times, the actual details buried deep in one of their stories actually contradict the initial impression one would get from the article. Today’s example is the lead story in the printed version of the business section that looks at the effect of the Trump tax cuts.

The front page of the section is dominated by this enormous visual that illustrates the percentage of workers across the country who have seen their wages rise. The headline of the story is “Trump’s Tax Cut, 10 Months Later” and the sub-headline is “Almost a year after a stimulus poured sugar into the economy, profits are fatter and minimum-wage workers across the country, below, are earning more. Can the jolt last?”

Looking at that, one would get the impression that a substantial majority of the country has seen wage growth and assume that it was driven by the GOP tax cuts. And, to support that impression, the second sentence of the story begins with “It has fattened the paychecks of most American workers”.

You have to wade 27 paragraphs into the story and the fourth paragraph from the end to finally get the real story. “Nearly a year after the cuts were signed into law, wage growth has yet to pick up when accounting for inflation. In September, the Labor Department reported that inflation-adjusted wages had risen 0.5 percent from the year before. That’s a slower rate of growth than the economy itself experienced in September 2017, when it was 0.6 percent”.

Now it’s certainly true that nominal wages have been rising but that is hardly surprising. Nominal wage growth actually continued to grow even during the depths of the Great Recession.  Passing that off as an accomplishment of the Trump tax cuts is highly deceptive. That is especially true when real wage growth has actually declined since those cuts were passed.

The online version of this story has rectified much of these issues. It’s sub-title now reads “Nearly a year after the tax cut, economic growth has accelerated. Wage growth has not. Companies are buying back stock and business investment is a mixed bag”. In addition, it leads with a graph about business investment.

Sadly, this article is reminiscent of the many articles about the Clinton Foundation during the 2016 campaign which initially intimated wrongdoing before finally ending the article by pointing out that, in fact, no wrongdoing was uncovered. It’s been happening far too many times at the self-proclaimed “newspaper of record”.