Hooray! Taxpayers will no longer have to pay for NPR, PBS's lefty propaganda
Taxpayers will no longer have to pay for the toxic, biased propaganda that federally funded media have been poisoning America with for the last 60 years.
The argument for government-run media has always been dubious at best; it's what dictators use to control and discipline the public.
The news media is supposed to scrutinize and reveal what our leaders are doing. How does that work when the government — of any sort — is picking up the bill?
Imagine if the government paid for newspapers. Would you trust the news it reported?
Ken Burns, who made the Civil War and baseball documentaries that aired on PBS, says that without public broadcasting, farmers won't hear the weather forecast. Their crops will be ruined.
Somebody tell Ken this isn't the Dust Bowl-era. Farmers today use GPS and AI to optimize irrigation and improve yields per acre.
They aren't huddled around the wireless waiting for the crop report from a publicly funded broadcaster.
Liberal supporters of PBS love to say that conservatives are trying to kill Big Bird. But 'Sesame Street' long ago partnered with HBO, and now Netflix. The Muppets brand is owned by Disney.
Market-driven programming ensures that quality content — for kids and adults — will reach its audience.
There's no lack of outlets. Cable and satellite television offer hundreds of channels, not to mention the Internet. There is more content out there than could be watched in a lifetime.
Perhaps there's an argument to be made for non-profit media. But that's why public television calls itself 'viewer supported' and runs fundraisers all the time.
The people who like it send in a few bucks every year to keep it going. You didn't think all those tote bags were free, did you?
Anyway, public broadcasting still has corporate 'sponsorship.' The companies just run their commercials at the beginning and end of the shows instead of the middle.
On top of everything, though, PBS and NPR had became overtly identified with lefty viewpoints.
Liberal to far-left opinions ran through all public media-sponsored news, documentaries, commentary and even featured programming.
NPR CEO Katherine Maher called Donald Trump a a 'deranged, racist sociopath.' She viewed 'reverence for truth' a 'distraction' that 'prevents us from getting things done.'
Maybe that's why NPR buried The Post's Hunter Biden laptop story, saying it was 'not really a story' and a 'distraction.'
The PBS NewsHour also dismissed the story as 'Russian disinformation.'
NPR ran stories defending looting. PBS featured a boy drag queen called 'Lil Miss Hot Mess' on a show for small children.
We live in a free country. People can produce and consume all kinds of programming for their enjoyment. And if it's good, it will find a paying audience.
But there's simply no reason for our taxes to support it. Audiences that want that programming can fund it themselves.
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Initially, the new law did eliminate tax for the vast majority of homeowners, but as home prices soared, so did the number who owed tax. Between 2000 and 2003 – a few years after the rule change – only about 38,000 home sales per year nationwide, or 1.3% of all existing home sales, had gross capital gains (excluding homeowner improvements) that exceeded $500,000, according to Cotality. By the end of 2023, almost 230,000 homes or 7.9% of all home sales nationwide – and almost 29% in California – were over the limit. A study commissioned by the National Association of Realtors found that 34% of homeowners today could already exceed $250,000 in capital gains and 10% have potential gains above $500,000. Those numbers could be 56% and 23%, respectively, by 2030 and nearly 70% and 38% by 2035. 'These outdated (exemption) thresholds are already distorting the housing market and locking up inventory, and it is getting worse every year,' the association wrote. What research says Several academic studies found that the tax law change in 1997 did increase housing turnover, and may have contributed to the sharp runup in home prices from the early 2000s until 2008, when the bubble burst. The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 'played a significant role in facilitating the boom in the residential real estate market that began shortly after its enactment,' Pete H. Oppenheimer, then a professor at the University of North Georgia, wrote in a 2014 paper. It created an opportunity for homeowners to receive tax free income when they resold their principal residences, which made homeownership more attractive and caused the real estate market to 'expand in volume and price,' he added. It also helped 'real estate investors and professionals to achieve tax free income … by converting rental property into a personal residence.' A Federal Reserve study published in 2008 concluded that the 1997 Act 'reversed the lock-in effect of capital gains taxes on houses with low and moderate capital gains.' However, it 'may have generated an unintended lock-in effect on houses with capital gains over the maximum exclusion amount.' Its author Hui Shan found that the short-term effect was 'much larger' than the long-term effect. A 2011 paper by Andrea Heuson and Gary Painter also found that housing turnover 'increased significantly' after 1997. 'The surprising result is how broad based the change in trading behavior is, appearing across all age ranges and impacting both trading up and trading down,' they wrote. Based on his past research, Painter predicted that eliminating the tax on home sales would increase sales. When he left his job at the University of Southern California to teach at the University of Cincinnati, Painter kept his home near Long Beach and rented it out because he didn't want to pay capital gains tax, but also in case he wanted to return to California one day. It's not just capital gains tax Capital gains are not the only culprit locking up inventory. Many homeowners with mortgages around 3% are reluctant to move, now that rates are hovering around 6% to 7%. That is the 'big 1,000-pound gorilla that has reduced mobility," Painter said. And in California, many sellers would face a big increase in their property tax assessment if they sold a long-held home and bought another. Proposition 19, passed by voters in 2020, was supposed to boost inventory by making it easier for people 55 or older to transfer their assessment from their current home to a new one, thus avoiding or reducing a property-tax increase. It also made it harder for children to keep a parent's low property tax base on an inherited home. It appears that more Bay Area seniors did move after Prop. 19 took effect, at least in the first few years. But results varied by county and the effects wore off over time. In Contra Costa, requests by seniors for Prop. 19 transfers went from around 200 per year before 2020 to about 1,000 a year after two years, but since then has tapered off to around 600 a year, said Gus Kramer, the county's assessor. In Santa Clara County, Prop. 19 'has been a lot less successful than anticipated. The biggest negative by far is capital gains,' DeLeon said. Unintended consequences If Congress eliminated capital gains tax on homes, Painter believes more people would move out of California. For people contemplating a move, losing their low property-tax base 'is not an issue, but (capital gains) taxes are. This would be an opportunity to cash in on their equity,' he said. And instead of making homes more affordable, it could increase prices. 'More generous tax treatment of homes could bid up home prices on the demand side, exacerbating concerns about housing affordability,' Joseph Rosenberg , a senior fellow with the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, said via email. San Francisco Chief Economist Ted Egan concurs. 'The expectation of reduced taxes upon sale would likely result in modest upward pressure on housing prices in places, like San Francisco, where profits on home sales often exceed the threshold,' he said via email. 'This in turn would lead to a modest increase in property taxes.'
