Skip to main content

In Ohio, a Tax Bill With Uncertain Payoffs Is Met With Ambivalence - The New York Times

posted onDecember 2, 2017
>

Article snippet: CANTON, Ohio — The tax bill convulsing a bitterly divided Congress may seem like the ultimate high stakes political showdown in Washington. But on a rainy afternoon in a county that voted for Donald J. Trump, it feels like distant noise, an opaque battle in a faraway land whose meaning for everyday life is unknown. “I heard a few things on the news, but you have trouble understanding it all,” said Pat Turk, an instructor at the National Beauty College on Cleveland Avenue. “I don’t think it will change things that much for us,” she said. “Taxes go up. That’s what they do.” For Republicans in Washington the bill is an outsize and perhaps ungainly political bet. They are casting its passage as a matter of electoral survival — a last chance to show that the party can get something big done in President Trump’s first year while it still has full control. Democrats see it as a clarifying moment when middle-class Trump voters might resent that their support for an anti-establishment billionaire has yielded budget-busting tax cuts for the rich. But in two days of interviews here in Stark County, a small patch of middle-class towns about an hour’s drive south of Cleveland, there was little evidence that anybody even noticed it was happening. Few expected a tax cut to be significant enough to matter very much. Most said that other issues, like jobs that paid living wages, were more important. “We are focusing too much on this tax thing, frankly,” said Gerry Noble, an elect... Link to the full article to read more

Emotional score for this article