Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, one of my favorite writers, has written one of my favorite pieces in recent memory. It’s both hilarious and poignant (and more than a little infuriating in its subject matter).
Taibbi starts by noting something that probably bothers most of us: the media’s bizarre obsession with trivia.
I’m not one of those curmudgeons who freaks out every time that Bradgelina moves the war off the front page of the Post, or Katie Couric decides to usher in a whole new era of network news with photos of the imbecile demon-spawn of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. I understand that we live in a demand-based economy and that there is far more demand for brainless celebrity bullshit than there is, say, for the fine print of the Health and Human Services budget.
But that was before this week. I awoke this morning in New York City to find Britney Spears plastered all over the cover of two gigantic daily newspapers, simply because she cut her hair off over the weekend. To me, this crosses a line. My definition of a news story involves something happening. If nothing happens, then you can’t have “news,” because nothing has changed since the day before. Britney Spears was an idiot last Thursday, an idiot on Friday, and an idiot on both Saturday and Sunday. She was, shockingly, also an idiot on Monday. It will be news when she stops being an idiot, and we’ll know when that happens, because she’ll have shot herself for the good of the planet. Britney Spears cutting her hair off is the least-worthy front page news story in the history of humanity.
Apparently, from now on, every time a jackass sticks a pencil in his own eye, we’ll have to wait an extra ten minutes to hear what happened on the battlefield or in Congress or any other place that actually matters.
But in this case, Taibbi wasn’t just going on a celebrity-news rant for no reason. Taibbi got a tip from someone in Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) office about some research on Bush’s proposed 2008 budget. The Hill staffer was struggling to get some media attention (any media attention) on the same day that Britney was shaving her head. It’s a shame.
The research from Sanders’ office included some rather startling revelations about Bush’s plans for the elimination of the estate tax, at a cost of $442 billion over the next decade, and how, exactly, the president plans to pay for them.
Sanders’s office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family — the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune — would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.
The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.
Or how about this: if the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy corporation — some of the world’s evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote D’Ivoire — if the estate tax goes, those assholes will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That’s more than three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period.
Some other notable estimate estate tax breaks, versus corresponding cuts:
* Cox family (Cox cable TV) receives $9.7 billion tax break while education would get $1.5 billion in cuts
* Nordstrom family (Nordstrom dept. stores) receives $826.5 million tax break while Community Service Block Grants would be eliminated, a $630 million cut
* Ernest Gallo family (shitty wines) receives a $468.4 million cut while LIHEAP (heating oil to poor) would get a $420 million cut
And so on and so on. Sanders additionally pointed out that the family of former Exxon/Mobil CEO Lee Raymond, who received a $400 million retirement package, would receive about $164 million in tax breaks.
Compare that to the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which Bush proposes be completely eliminated, at a savings of $108 million over ten years. The program sent one bag of groceries per month to 480,000 seniors, mothers and newborn children.
This is what conservative politics is all about in 2007. Bush’s budget increases spending, gives lavish tax cuts to people who don’t need more money, and cut spending dramatically on those who need the most help. As Taibbi put it, “That’s not only bad government, it’s bad capitalism.”
Taibbi notes that the traditional media largely ignored all of this. I’m willing to cut the reporters some slack — they know full well that Congress is going to throw Bush’s budget in the recycling bin, so they’re not inclined to report on a budget that isn’t going anywhere.
But Bush’s budget matters because it’s indicative of what the White House wants to do. It highlights what kind of country the president wants. It makes plain, in black and white, who wins and who loses in Bush’s America.
Any news outlet who believes this is less important than Anna Nicole Smith’s death or Britney Spears’ hair is failing the national interest. And any news consumer who thinks the media’s priorities are just fine, and cares more about Smith and Spears than what Bush wants to do to the country, deserves to be ripped off.