Political Analysis in the Media

“Trump keepsundercutting one of his central arguments for overhauling the tax system”

This political analysis by Philip Bump was posted to the Washington Post as of October 5. The article makes the argument that President Donald Trump is acting inconsistently to the data he presents.

First, Bump presents a Tweet posted by the President that states, “Stock Market hits an ALL-TIME high! Unemployment lowest in 16 years! Business and manufacturing enthusiasm at highest level in decades!” He confirms that this is true with a graphical comparison of unemployment rates from the Federal Reserve.

Secondly, he highlights a Tweet by Gizmodo’s Matt Novak, who claimed how unusual it was to be pushing tax cuts that are being sold as boosting unemployment. As well, Bump claims that Trump “cited employment as a specific goal of the policy” during the speech that announced the tax proposal.

Bump includes an excerpt from the Federal Reserve stating:

           

“Even in good times, a healthy, dynamic economy will have at least some unemployment as workers switch jobs, and as new workers enter the labor market and other workers leave it. The lowest level of unemployment that the economy can sustain is difficult to determine and has probably changed over time due to changes in the composition of the labor force, and changes in how employers search for workers and how workers search for jobs.”

He claims that perhaps President Trump’s tax cuts could create a large amount of total people in the labor pool, thus altering the statistics. This could account for some of the baby boomers that “are hitting retirement age and, well, retiring.”

All-in-all Philip Bump does a great job of relaying evidence in a clear and concise way that is easy for the reader to understand. He includes clean graphs and imbedded links to throughout the analysis. On the flip side, there is not a lot of contextual information regarding the details of the tax proposal that would lead into his overall arguments. He also writes of a speech, given by the President, as a source of evidence; however the point could have been made clearer if mention had been made of the exact quote or location of the quote within the source.

Overall, this analysis was pleasantly presented, but could have been more specific in the retrieval of data.

Original Analysis: 

 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/10/05/trump-keeps-undercutting-one-of-his-central-arguments-for-overhauling-the-tax-system/?utm_term=.e621c1188d71>