It’s not often these days that there’s good news on two fronts. The nonradical elements in the media are getting restless. And thanks to a band of free market economists, the chances of enacting a cut in the payroll tax that could quickly boost the economy have improved significantly.
Bari Weiss, a columnist and editor at the New York Times, was the first journalist to act. She sparked talk of a rebellion against the left-wing bias now raging in the media. She had to take the brave step of quitting her job and announcing it publicly to produce this breakthrough.
In her three years at the New York Times, Weiss had been persecuted by a mob of intolerant colleagues who loathed her moderate-to-conservative columns and her efforts to expand the paper’s editorial views beyond leftist screeds. This, after all, was what she had been hired to do.
One might have expected publisher A.G. Sulzberger and his underlings to rush to her defense like fabled newspaper barons in the past did to protect their writers and editors. But Weiss was thrown to the wolves. The New York Times’s brass let the harassment go on and on until she quit.
She wrote about her treatment in a letter to Sulzberger and then went further. She criticized the “orthodoxy” of far-left viewpoints in the paper. “Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions,” she said.
Two days after the Weiss bombshell, Andrew Sullivan announced he was leaving New York magazine, where he had been the premier writer and a popular figure in the journalistic world. Sullivan’s spot on the ideological spectrum appears to be close to Weiss’s.
He is English and gay, and his writing on gay and transgender issues seemingly got him in trouble with his editor and the transgender lobby. As best I can tell, limits were placed in the subjects he wrote about. Like Weiss, he clashed with a reigning orthodoxy on the Left.
Sullivan was accused of wanting the “T” dropped from the acronym “LGBT.” To be separated from the larger “lesbian, gay, and bisexual” lobby might have weakened the transgender group’s political clout — or at least, that’s my assumption.
Both Weiss and Sullivan popped political bubbles. With the influence of leftists at a peak, “the closing of the American mind has advanced far beyond the condition Allan Bloom described in ‘The Closing of the American Mind,’ his 1987 book about the rise of moral relativism on U.S. colleges and universities,” radio host Hugh Hewitt wrote in the Washington Post.
“That is true on the Right as well,” according to Hewitt. “Intellectual curiosity about worlds, and worldviews other than our own, is at a low ebb. So seek out the bubble-breakers.”
But there aren’t many of them these days. Instead, the leaders in both print and broadcast tend to be cowards. Many quiver at the thought of disagreeing with noisy radicals and militant leftist organizations. Black Lives Matter, for instance, is treated gingerly by liberal politicians and corporations fearful of being called racist. They pretend BLM is focused on a single issue, police violence against blacks. They go out of their way to ignore its broad commitment to Marxism.
Given the Left’s capture of the press, it was not surprising that the cut in the Social Security (or payroll) tax got little attention when it was proposed weeks ago by economists Art Laffer, Steve Forbes, and Steve Moore. Even a quiet endorsement by President Trump received meager coverage.
Three things have boosted the plan, which affects both the worker and employer sides. First, a study by Moore and University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan found that the cut would generate 2.7 million new jobs over the July 1-Dec. 31 period. Meanwhile, the extra $600 a week unemployment benefit means that 4 out of 5 workers receive more pay for not working. This would result in the loss of 10 million jobs.
Second, Larry Kudlow, the White House economic adviser, informed the Committee to Unleash Prosperity that the president wouldn’t sign the “phase four” stimulus plan without a payroll tax included.
And third, though the Wall Street Journal doesn’t like temporary tax cuts and argues that neither more spending nor tax relief may be needed, it’s not opposed. “At least the payroll tax cut won’t harm job creation and won’t keep the jobless rate higher than it should be when voters go to the polls,” it said.
Slowly but surely, a tax cut that spurs jobs and work is moving toward enactment.
