Sometimes you can tell a lot about what a writer is REALLY saying by paying attention not to what they say in one article, but by what they say over course of a few articles. Let’s take a look at James Pethokoukis, a writer for US News & World Report. Apparently he’s a smart guy (after all, the fact that he won Jeopardy is in his little bio blurb), so let’s take a look at exhibit A, the Democrats and tax increases:

The Dems’ version of pay-go would also be another step toward killing the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, due to expire in 2010.

Right off the bat he’s phrasing it as “Democrats killing the tax cuts”, rather than “Democrats trying to repair the fact that Bush has been running the country with a credit card” but that’s fine. If he wants to phrase it that way, more power to him. Moving on (emphasis mine).

So over 10 years, the period over which the costs of these things are usually calculated, elimination of the tax cuts means a $2 trillion tax increase–assuming no effect on economic growth. The repeal might make budget hawks happy but maybe not families who would see a $500-a-kid cut in their child tax credit or investors who would face higher capital gains taxes.

Eesh. The thing that gets me is that this is always tilted as though it were a bunch of “budget hawks” just wringing their hands and laughing as they steal money from the poor families. Now, I could rail into the argument itself and how the tax cuts have hurt us plenty and this is damage control, but I was talking about patterns. Here’s exhibit B, discussing corporate tax breaks.

In short, CEOs think we live in a more dynamic, risky, and chaotic world. As a result, they’re keeping more cash on hand to deal with this challenging business environment. So cutting corporate taxes might indeed be one way, though hardly the only way, to help workers.

Now obviously the guy likes tax breaks. But piece the two arguments together: Democrats are trying to cost you trillions, and we should cut corporations taxes because they live in a “risky” world and doing so would actually help the little guy. Ignoring that even CEOs who get ousted in disgrace tend to get multi-million dollar pension plans and they somehow find ways to line the pockets of politicians, apparently they REALLY are just saving the money for a rainy day and mean ol’ Democrats are hurting average workers by taxing them.

Would it be unfair to say James Pethokoukis is hoping that cheap appeals to fans of “the little guy” will make people support irresponsible tax cuts for the wealthy? I don’t think so, but then what do I know? I stay up at night fantasizing about making families pay more taxes for no good reason.

I really do think one of these days we should split the country in half for a while. The republicans get the south, democrats get the north (I figure we can’t split it east and west since we’d lose either California or New York). Then in 10 years we’ll see where all of the working families are going.