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Calgary Herald
12 hours ago
- Sport
- Calgary Herald
When did Sportsnet's Hockey Night In Canada lose its way?
Article content 6. Too many bodies. Having six (and sometimes seven) competing talking heads during pre-games and intermission is drastic overkill. The result is that the sum of the parts is thus far less dynamic than some of the individuals. It also mutes the potential star power of those on the panel hired to provide just that. Article content 7. Back to the TNT-HNIC comparison. Not that pre-game interviews are often revealing, but prior to Game 6 the American broadcaster did a better setup job with rinkside comments from the key face of each team — the Oilers' Connor McDavid and the Panthers' Matthew Tkachuk. Article content 8. Chemistry. I'm of the belief that there are enough engaging voices on the Hockey Night crew, but the key to making them shine is to have them work with each other. On-air chemistry shouts authenticity to the viewer and the show aches for this. Article content 9. Entertainment value. As one seasoned observer of the telecasts put it to me, none of the on-air group are a disaster (though some are better than others) but there is a blandness to the group. Analysis is important, but when it comes across as overdone and scripted, it's begging viewers to turn to the baseball game at intermission. Article content Article content 10. Give us some banter. For all its faults, especially towards the end, the back-and-forth between MacLean and Don Cherry on Coach's Corner was appointment viewing. I'm not sure if anything does that in the current iteration. Over on TNT, meanwhile, you get to hear Wayne Gretzky giving it to Bissonnette or the panel goading Barkley into telling viewers why he jokingly detests Seth Jones because of his NBA-playing father Popeye. Article content 11. Inane analysis. Not a slight on Jennifer Botterill specifically, but when five commentators are asked to come up with three or four talking points per intermission, it's a reach. Case in point: After 40 minutes on Tuesday, with all but the final score inevitable, Botterill said 'Can the Oilers find a way to come back? Absolutely.' If the former Canadian Olympian really believed that, she might have been the only one in the building. Article content Article content 12. Kelly Hrudey could be better used. If anyone gets lost in the drone of competing voices, it might be him. On a more focussed show, for example, a host would have grilled him more on the struggles of Oilers goalie Stuart Skinner, a huge story line throughout and again in Game 6. Hrudey offered some of that in the second intermission, but we wanted more. Article content 13. Speaking of more … As previously noted in this space, the one potential impact voice is Kevin Bieksa, the former hard-nosed defenceman who dishes hard-nosed commentary. Let him loose. And maybe bring in the always-opinionated Nick Kypreos for the odd cameo. Article content 14. Take a breath. When there are so many talking heads scrambling to get in as many words as possible, information overload mutes the impact. Too often, the show needs to breathe. Article content 15. Chris Cuthbert. No, the veteran play-by-play man isn't a fault — he's the opposite. From Sidney Crosby's Golden Goal to now, he has been the voice of so many iconic Canadian hockey moments and continues to be so just as the late, great Bob Cole was in his day. Now it's incumbent for Cuthbert to have a better produced show around him. Article content
Yahoo
06-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
What longtime tax reform 'zealot' Bill Bradley has to say about Trump's plans
Former US Sen. Bill Bradley has long known that he can be a bit of a broken record when it comes to tax reform. An oft-repeated joke he tells, including during a recent one-man-show, is that during his time in the Senate in the 1980s his own daughter rightly knew that if her dad was on TV "all he's going to talk about are loopholes." That's hasn't changed much in the subsequent decades. Bradley — also a Rhodes Scholar, an NBA champion with the New York Knicks, and a former presidential candidate — recently spoke with Yahoo Finance about the state of America's tax code, the "bangles" that he said President Trump wants to add to the system, and America's out-of-control debt. Bradley's successors in the Senate continue to labor to put together a tax bill with a framework unveiled and passed this past week that could eventually allow lawmakers to add trillions to deficits in the coming decades. The runaway debt, Bradley said, could soon lead to "an economy that's in trouble." The Democrat also discussed the role of tariffs after President Trump unveiled his "Liberation Day" tariff plans with some pushback from some Republican Senators. Asked whether tariffs could pay for tax cuts, he was emphatic: "No, that's ridiculous." When Bradley represented New Jersey in the Senate from 1979 to 1997, he made taxes his centerpiece issue. He says his interest was piqued during his NBA-playing career when he read Milton Friedman and realized as a player he was, for tax purposes at least, "a depreciable asset." He unveiled a tax reform plan in 1981 soon after taking office and then helped lead a years-long effort that culminated in a landmark reform in 1986, simplifying the tax rate schedule and eliminating a vast number of Bradley's hated loopholes. He joked this past week that his spearheading of the effort around some real estate tax deductions earned him a spot on the "enemies list" of a then-rising real estate developer named Donald Trump. When Bradley made a return visit to the Senate in 2015 to talk about taxes, he said any good reform effort needed "a zealot," adding "that's the role I played in 1986." He still embraces the zealot label. Here are excerpts from the wide-ranging conversation: Yahoo Finance: I wanted to start on your overall sense of the tax system in the 1980s versus now. That 1986 effort was clearly fueled by this sense of unfairness about how the tax system was then. How do you view the system then versus now? Bill Bradley: The system itself now is still riddled with loopholes but not as many as existed back in the 1980s. What has happened is that the burden of the system has moved downwards, and the benefit has moved upwards. I still believe the lower the rate, the better. I still am not supportive of distorted investments represented by loopholes. You have to ask yourself, what's the purpose of a tax system? Is it to do things that you should do through appropriations? Or is it to raise revenue for the government in the most economical, simplest, and fairest way for the broad base of American people. And I think it's the latter. What's your level of optimism that any kind of improvement [toward your long-held principles of broadening the base, increasing fairness, and simplifying the code] is possible in the short term? I do not think this kind of system has a chance with [Trump] as president. The fact that Ronald Reagan was president made a big difference [in 1986]. And as important: Don Regan who was then Treasury Secretary and then Chief of Staff Jim Baker. When it became game time these were people of real substance and you could trust them. And Trump does not have that kind of team. Plus, I don't think he'd want to do it. A person who believes the way you should finance the government is through tariffs is not a person who would say I think the market should allocate resources in a tax system in accordance with all the principles that I just laid out for you. The few of the things Trump has talked about adding to the tax code are a series of campaign-trail promises. No taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime, no taxes on social security payment, automobiles interest deductions ... They're just like bangles. They're political gifts to people. Anytime Trump says anything, the first thing you should say is what constituency is he trying to buy off? It'll all be based on narrow political calculation. He tends to view the world bilaterally, right? Me versus this country or me versus this company. His deals are bilateral, and the world is too complex to view bilaterally. If you look at many of the successes since World War II, they are all multilateral: multilateral trading systems, multilateral financial systems, multilateral defense systems. To link these two conversations together on tariffs and taxes: Can tariffs help pay for tax cuts? No, that's ridiculous. It's totally ridiculous. With tariffs, you have put the tariff on, and then, of course, the other country responds with a tariff. And your trade drops and your economy drops. The reason we have tariffs is there are some times when a country needs some relief for a period of time. And then after that, once you put all the tariffs on, it becomes just another cost that's passed on, which is inflationary. Or some companies won't raise prices, but they will lay off workers, so unemployment goes up. Learn more: What Trump's tariffs mean for the economy and your wallet On the flip side of it, I wanted to ask you about the world of congressional bill scoring. My sense of the 1986 effort from your comments — and also I should say from the book "Showdown at Gucci Gulch" — is that score-keeping was a very frustrating experience at the time, but it helped force discipline. Oh yeah. It was a discipline, no question. It had to be revenue neutral. So how did you wanna pay for it? You paid for it by closing loopholes. Because otherwise, politicians unrestrained tend to give too much away. It seems to me, as someone that covers it closely, that a lot of those restraints are sort of coming off now. We have something called the current policy baseline, which makes it so you can say we're going to extend tax cuts, and we're going to consider it free for the purposes of scoring. And we have a Senate framework this week that could authorize $5.8 trillion in new deficit spending with some offsets. What's lost when the brakes are off as they seem to be today? Truth and discipline. To the extent that you don't give a damn about deficits, you're inviting a run on the dollar. And if you have a run on a dollar, you're then going to have much higher interest rates and much higher unemployment. Basically, they think they got it fixed for today, or maybe this month, but it's not fixed for the long term. Also, who the hell is doing the contingency plan? If indeed the world's investors decide the game is up on the dollar, we don't have a plan to repay the debt. What do we do then? Is there a way that moment of truth can come and not be incredibly dramatic for the United States? No. How much of our Treasury bonds do we sell to non-US parties? And take that number and say, "If we lose that, how high will interest rates have to be before people will put the money back?" That then ends up with an economy that's in trouble. Ben Werschkul is a Washington Correspondent for Yahoo Finance. 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