ABC's Broken Tax 'Factcheck'

One of the core debates about federal tax policy concerns the expiring Bush tax cuts. A September 8 "factcheck" segment on ABC World News did more to propagate myths than to set the record straight.

The White House position is that the Bush tax cuts,
which under current law expire in 2010, should be extended for the vast
majority of the population. Rates would go up only for taxable income earned above $195,550.
The Republican counter-argument is that increasing the taxes paid by
the wealthy will actually harm small businesses. As anchor Diane Sawyer
put it: "Republicans say raising taxes even on the wealthy will hurt too
many small businesses, and that will stall the creation of jobs. So,
who is right? We asked Jonathan Karl to check the facts."

But Karl's factcheck only served to muddy the
debate. Karl interviewed two small business owners who claimed they
would be adversely affected. One said an increase in his personal tax
bill would cost his company between $20,000 and $40,000. Karl's second
source claimed a potential tax bill increase of $120,000; when Karl
asked him to predict how many jobs would be lost, he replied: "It would
be a minimum of two. Up to probably four."

If the point was to illustrate how the tax changes would affect small businesses, ABC
chose what appear to be remarkably unrepresentative examples; those
estimated tax bills would suggest that both of these small business
owners are bringing home what most people would consider to be enormous
personal salaries. If their numbers on how much the tax changes will
cost them are accurate, then the first business owner makes roughly
$700,000-$1.1 million a year in taxable income, while the other takes
home about $2.9 million annually. (These incomes were calculated based
on tax bracket information from the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities, 8/13/10.) The Washington Post (8/12/10)
published a graph using data from the Joint Committee on Taxation that
illustrates just how rich you have to be in order to be seriously
disadvantaged by Obama's tax proposal.

And the focus on jobs was misleading. The
Congressional Budget Office (1/10; cited by CBPP, 8/3/10) found that
"increasing the after-tax income of businesses typically does not create
much incentive for them to hire more workers in order to produce more,
because production depends principally on their ability to sell their
products."

Karl claimed that the first business owner "says
raising the top rates would cost his company $20,000 to $40,000 next
year...because his company's profits exceed $200,000 and are declared on
his personal tax return." The owner, Drew Greenblatt, is quoted, "Well,
this is gonna pull cash out of our company, so we're gonna have less
money to invest."

But personal income is by definition money that's
been taken out of the company; if he wanted to invest it in the company,
he could leave it in the company, and not put it into his personal bank
account where he'll have to pay personal income tax on it, regardless
of what the rate is. Taxing Greenblatt's personal income doesn't cost
his company anything--unless he decides to pay himself a larger salary
to maintain a lavish standard of living.

Likewise, taxing the multi-million dollar personal
profits of the second business owner doesn't force him to cut two to
four jobs; the company's profitability doesn't have anything to do with
what percentage the boss pays on his personal income.

After spending ample time on these issues, Karl
finally turns to "factchecking" the question--will Obama's proposed tax
changes "hurt too many small businesses"?--that Sawyer posed in
introducing the segment: "Democrats say only a tiny fraction of small
businesses would be affected. That's true, according to the Tax Policy
Center, which says only 2.5 percent of small businesses would see their
taxes go up." So after giving viewers misleading anecdotes about the
harm that might come from allowing tax cuts for the wealthy to expire, ABC's Karl finally delivered data that might be useful for assessing this policy question.

But then he found a way to try to overstate the
impact of the tax increase: "So, 2.5 percent affected. We asked the Tax
Policy Center how many businesses that is. Their answer? 894,000 small
businesses that would see their taxes go up. A small percentage, but a
large number of small businesses."

Transforming a percentage that perfectly illustrates
the effect a policy will have into a much larger, out-of-context number
seems designed to reinforce the Republican side of this debate. Why
would ABC's "factcheck" aim to mislead viewers?

ACTION:
Tell ABC World News that their September 8 "factcheck" report on the tax cut debate was misleading.

CONTACT:
ABC World News with Diane Sawyer
Web form:
https://abcnews.go.com/Site/page?id=3271346&cat=World%20News%20with%20Diane%20Sawyer