I can think of a couple reasons. First and foremost, at least some (if not most) of the benefit would get captured by lenders, since the subsidy would artificially boost the demand curve, allowing lenders to charge higher interest rates. And most folks around the BoingBoing BBS just LOVE subsidizing banks, right?
Also, there’s a decent policy argument for encouraging home ownership, most Americans can’t afford to own a home without a mortgage, and homes historically have been far more likely to appreciate than depreciate over time. And while I suppose there’s a short-term macroeconomic argument for encouraging debt-funded consumer spending, it’s hard to see the long-term benefits. So why in the world would we want to use government funds (which would have to come from increased taxes somewhere else) to subsidize it?
And the argument that individuals should be able to deduct interest because corporations can is also bunk. Businesses (whether a giant corporation or a struggling solo artist) are taxed on their net income after ALL legitimate business expenses (not just interest expense, but also payments to suppliers, salaries for employees, etc.). At the individual level, however, we only allow deductions from gross income for things the government has chosen to subsidize, mainly charitable contributions and mortgage interest for most people who itemize. We don’t allow deductions for rent or for buying a car or clothing or food or all the other things we spend money on because then we would no longer have an income tax, but a savings tax.
[quote=“micah, post:127, topic:50578”]I can think of a couple reasons. First and foremost, at least some (if not most) of the benefit would get captured by lenders, since the subsidy would artificially boost the demand curve, allowing lenders to charge higher interest rates.[/quote]Thus showing you have no idea how credit cards and credit card debt work. Credit card interest is typically (a) tied to the prime rate +some %, so it’s not going to increase just because people can write it off on their taxes, and (b) people don’t carry balances and pay interest on credit cards willingly, so why would this have any effect on interest rates? Credit Card companies charge the highest rate they think they can get away with, and 99% of those paying the interest don’t shop around for rates as-is.
[quote=“micah, post:127, topic:50578”]At the individual level, however, we only allow deductions from gross income for things the government has chosen to subsidize, mainly charitable contributions and mortgage interest for most people who itemize. We don’t allow deductions for rent or for buying a car or clothing or food or all the other things we spend money on because then we would no longer have an income tax, but a savings tax.[/quote]But this is not similar in any way - this is an issue of income, not purchasing. If you make money by having a savings account (or similar) you pay tax on it, since they consider that income. On the other hand, if you owe interest on a loan, they don’t consider that negative income, even though it is exactly the same as income interest, just in reverse.
For an example of why this is so ludicrous, think of someone who has $100k in the bank earning 1% interest. They suddenly have a medical emergency with a bill for $100k. Their options are now to either drain their bank account, or take out a $100k loan. They opt for the loan through a special low interest medical debt program at 2% - which is higher than their savings rate, but they will have savings for future emergencies that may not get preferential rates on loans. Taxes come around, and they have to pay taxes on $1000 interest income, even though they actually lost $1000 in interest.
How is this fair to say these two things that are interest, both based on banking account amounts, are only ever calculated in ways that are not in your favor?
I’m not talking about deducting the cost as a business expense, but rather the rental or leasing company deducting the cost regardless of whether ultimate use is business or personal. I’m not saying that the IRS wouldn’t/doesn’t go after egregious cases, but they would have to make the case that it was a transaction done just for tax benefit and not for any business purpose. Which they did with some government asset “lease back” arrangements intended to transfer depreciation deductions from non-taxed entities about a decade ago.
That’s the way income taxes work. You pay tax on your personal income, whether that income comes in the form of a salary, gambling winnings, goods received by bartering your services, or interest income. With the exception of specific categories that the government chooses to subsidize (charitable deductions, mortgage interest, medical bills over a certain percentage of your income, etc.), you don’t get to deduct from your income the things you spend your money on. You can’t deduct the salary you pay to your cleaning lady, your gambling losses, or the value of the goods you gave someone else to compensate them for services they performed for you (even though all the counterparties are supposed to be paying taxes on what you pay them). And you can’t deduct interest you pay on your credit card or auto loan (which at the end of the day isn’t fundamentally different from those other expenses–you’re just buying access to money rather than buying a good or service). If you could deduct all those things, then the government’s tax revenues would be zero because for every dollar of income there would be an offsetting dollar of expense.
Regardless of whether you’re a corporation or an individual, if you own a home or automobile that you rent out, you have rental income against which you can deduct the interest expense and depreciation associated with the asset you own. It doesn’t matter if the lessee of the home or automobile is using it for personal or business use, just that YOU are using it for a business purpose (renting it out).
And that’s my point. The interest on a loan to purchase property (real or personal) that is rented out to others is deductible. In the absence of a mortgage interest deduction for owner/occupiers, the tax code incentivizes a landlord/tenant relationship. Many of the wealthy would create real estate holding companies to purchase houses and then lease them at market rates so that the company would be able deduct the taxes on the interest.
I don’t think there’s another way to read it if we objectively apply universal rules of English grammar. But let’s say there are different ways to read it, as you suggest. And if there are, then this headline has spectacularly failed to “convey a lot of information in a limited space,” which is the justification for the alleged ambiguity. It has conveyed two different bits of information in a limited space, which really isn’t that helpful.
If people come into the thread and say, “When I read this headline I thought X, but the article says Y.” then I’m not going to tell them they are wrong. The claim that the headline is inarguably designed to mislead raised my hackles.
But also, “universal rules of English grammar”? We might as well be arguing about fairies.
I’m sorry if you think it outrageous to say that relative clauses have rules of construction that are pretty much universally observed. If you don’t think this is a universal rule, it should be easy to find other examples that use the relative clause as the subject of a verb outside that clause. I think you’ll have difficult finding an example of this, much less an example written by a professional.
What is inarguable is that, according to basic rules of grammar, the headline is incorrect (and this is why people thought X after reading the headline)."
It’s not inarguable that he intended to mislead, and we just argued about it above. I happen to think that a professional writer would not have made a mistake such as this, and that the only logical conclusion is that it was intentional. Your argument is that this is an innocent mistake, and I find this difficult to believe.
My argument is that I understood the headline (I understood it slightly differently than he meant it, but I did understand that in the context of the headline “receiving” $460k might mean that members of her family received it). So no, I am not arguing it was an innocent mistake. Of course the headline says she received it using the grammar rules that you are discussing, but what does it mean for her to receive it? After she boasts about her family’s self-reliance, and takes on that value for her own, that means that she has received a benefit if her family received it (which, by the way, is a standard interpretation of a politician receiving a benefit found in every conflict of interest law ever written).
If I understood that the $460k referred to in the headline may have been a benefit received by her family and even that it wasn’t necessarily a cash handout but could have been another benefit valued at that amount, then I don’t need to argue it was an innocent mistake to argue against malice, which I think is a bizarre conclusion. What was Cory’s master plan in concocting this foul headline anyway? To have people who aren’t inclined to dig any deeper walk away thinking that a senator that they don’t even know the name of is a hypocrite? Would an “accurate” headline have done a worse job of accomplishing that goal. “GOP senator boasts of the self-reliance of her family that took $460k in federal subsidies.” Other than satisfying pendants, what would be the difference between that headline and the real one that would make malicious manipulation worthwhile?
I think the headline I just proposed is much more likely to lead people to a correct conclusion about what happened. It could probably be further clarified. But malice? Why?
If she takes on that value as her own, why write that she boasted of her family’s self reliance? Why insert the reference to family there, and not also in reference to who received the benefits?
And “every conflict of interest law ever written”? Unlike my universal rule of grammar pertaining to relative clauses, this generality is demonstrably false.
For example, [18 USC 208][1] limits financial conflicts to spouses and minor children. The members of Ernst’s family that received subsidies were her father, brother, and grandfather.
Uh, to further his political beliefs, by making it sound like she personally received $460k?
The difference? I can think of many: credibility, integrity, believability, reputation, etc.
I mean, sure Fox news may have been factually incorrect to say that there are no-go zones in some Muslim-dominated Muslim districts. But their defenders say that although this is incorrect, there really are places that feel unsafe or where outsiders fear going. Are people who called out Fox news just pedants?
I agree with you that a clearer and more accurate headline would carry most of the punch without opening Cory to criticism, and I think it’s silly that he doesn’t write in this style. But I believe he has a tendency to write exaggerated headlines that push pretty hard against the truth. I think it’s silly and hurts his credibility in ways that aren’t necessary, but I don’t believe he is unaware of what he is writing and the objective interpretation of his words. In other words, I believe it is intentional.
[1]: http://www.oge.gov/DisplayTemplates/StatutesRegulationsDetail.aspx?id=298
A fair cop. (Though on the comparison to “universal grammar” I’m not sure on whether it makes sense to compare exaggerated and falsified claims to non-falsifiable ones. You: That’s not non-falsifiable. Me: Look at these chinese menus, japanese t-shirts, ambiguous headlines and people who speak English but have never heard a native English speaker speak it. You: Bad translations aren’t English, bastardized phrases aren’t English, those headlines are ambiguous but not intentionally misleading [or they are which furthers my point] and you can’t point a an instance of anyone breaking the specific grammar rule we are discussing here)
Sure, the integrity of an unknown person, because we haven’t read the article to even find out who it is. The article has far more worrisome facts (to me) about her being an auditor for the county that awarded her father sizeable construction contracts (maybe that conflict of interest rule should be broader). Clicking through to the full piece shows that she “philosophically” opposes agricultural aid but would only eliminate it under conditions that can’t really be satisfied. So reading it honestly makes her seem worse than the headline, because receiving federal subsidies is legal if hypocritical while the whole construction contract thing seems shady and she’s pretty hypocritical in any event. Like I said, if you want to talk about the virtue of your family and you don’t call out the members of your family who are acting contrary to that virtue, it’s fair for others to hold you to your association with them (headlines aside).
You didn’t actually say what the difference was, you just listed a bunch of words. A person reads the headline and thinks that there is a GOP senator who boasted about her family’s independence and personally benefitted from $460k in federal subsidies. That person has no interest in reading the full story (since otherwise the headline is a moot point). Cory’s dastardly scheme has worked. The world is different how?
An even more accurate headline would be, “Some GOP senator is a hypocrite” or “Click here if you like to roll your eyes at right-wing politicians.” Those would convey was the story was really about. I, too, wish Cory would write headlines that were more accurate in this way so that I could come to the comments section of a story like this enjoy my little echo chamber of jokes at the expense of right-wing politicians without mythological attempts to turn the headline itself - which I was able to read using a magic trick known as reading-for-meaning-instead-of-parsing-for-inconsistencies - into a struggle of good versus evil.
Oh, you misunderstand what I was saying (and I guess I misunderstood what you were asking for). I’m saying that writing the headline the way he did calls into questions Cory’s credibility, integrity, believability, and reputation.
As for Ernst, I suppose the difference is whether she practices what she preaches, or not. She doesn’t have agency over her family, but she does over herself, so whether she is the one who accepted the subsidies or not is an important one, even if you believe in trickle-down economics when it comes to subsidies.
It may still be false of her to say her family was self-sufficient, but the level of hypocrisy is different.
Sure, but the expense of saying who, what, when, where, why, or how.
That still isn’t what I was asking though. I was asking what Cory’s plan was when he intentionally concocted this headline to make unwitting readers believe that there is a GOP senator (no mention of which one) who has boasted about her family’s self-reliance and received farm subsidies.
If the headline left us thinking that there is a GOP senator who boasts of self-reliance while collecting hundreds of thousands in federal subsidies, that’s true, maybe even in the amount listed. After all, grammar rules don’t let us magically know the headline is about Ernst. Sen. Chuck Grassley has collected $327,000 in the database and, naturally, boasts of self-reliance and advocates for small government. Since the public database only goes to 1995, it might actually total more than $460k. So the headline might be conveying directly accurate information after all, even under “official” grammar (though we would have to extrapolate about years before 1995, which would require more research than a few google searches). It’s just that the headline leaves you with accurate information about Chuck Grassley and reading the article will let you know about Ernst, while also correcting any misinterpretation.
All of this is beside the question of whether we honestly believe that Ernst’s family only started taking farm subsidies in 1995. Since the database doesn’t go before that, we’re just left to wonder. It’s totally possible that her father never received any subsidies while she was a child (which would go directly to her “family self-reliance” claim) but it’s probably more plausible that the number $460k is an understatement, and that she directly benefited from it.
The current headline does not have who, when, where, why or how anyway, and at best scarcely covers what.
I believe the point of headlines is that they pertain to the article they are the head of. So while the headline may be true, it’s not a statement related to the article it pretends to be head of (and can’t possibly apply to a male senator). I mean, I could write a headline saying “Prominent Canadian blogger and author beats his wife and likes her to shit directly into his mouth” and then run this above an article on Cory. I think he would have a point if he was upset at this headline, even if it I could prove it is factually true for some prominent Canadian blogger and author.
Who: female GOP senator, a potential pool of 6. Narrow them to farming states and you have 2.
What: hypocrisy.
How: by receiving $460K despite boasting of self sufficiency.
Why: (GOP senator?)
Of course that’s the point of headlines. I am trying to concoct a motive for this dastardly deception. Since reading the headline and walking away without reading the story doesn’t substantially mislead and reading the headline with the story doesn’t mislead.
‘Headline doesn’t match story’ is the essential complaint of clickbait - the point of the deception is to get people to read a story they might not have been interested in otherwise, the reader feels tricked. I don’t quite see how this headline accomplishes that either. Anyone interested in reading about a GOP senator’s hypocrisy is getting their fill of that from the facts of the story.
We’ve got a headline that doesn’t match the content of the story. What effect does this have on the world? I can’t see any. If Mr. Doctorow is so stupid as to actually do this on purpose to no particular effect, why is it hard to believe he is so careless as to post something to a blog without double-checking his headline? Why is it hard to believe he is so stupid as to not know the rules of English grammar in the first place (he’s a professional writer, as you note, and professional writers have proofreaders and editors)?
There’s one possibility that I haven’t considered, though, that Cory is actually being incredibly clever here. He’s crafted a headline that read carefully and literally says something that isn’t true, but that doesn’t substantially mislead anyone who doesn’t read the story, doesn’t mislead anyone into reading the story, and that doesn’t create any confusion about the facts for a person who does read the story. Then the moderators take a complete hands-off policy about this total off-topic nonsense sideline.
Could it be that Cory’s secret motive was that he loves watching pedants get squeamish about his headlines? Now that’s an actual human motive for action.
It’s is a particular conservative conceit however, at that age, to be born on third base and act like one hit a triple and to literally complain about pork, while a pig farmer.
