Gross Film Gross
The Washington Post , New York Times ,
and Los
Angeles Times lead with last night's agreement by Republican House and
Senate leaders on a tax cut bill. (The Democrats weren't invited to the
discussions.) USA Today goes inside with that story and leads instead
with the first guilty plea in the Salt Lake Olympics bribery scandal, a story
nobody else fronts. The plea bargain describes phony paperwork designed to
falsely portray as a salary payments made by Salt Lake Olympic officials to the
son of an influential IOC member from South Korea.
All the papers note that the GOP compromise tax bill, imposing an aggregate cut of $792
billion, provides for a reduction of one percentage point in all income tax
rates. There's also a drop in the top rate on capital gains, from 20 percent
down to 18, a reduction in the "marriage penalty" for many couples filing
jointly, and a phase-out of the inheritance tax that now applies to large
estates. The tax rate reductions are conditioned on continued success at
reducing the national debt. President Clinton has vowed to veto any bill
putting this much of the budget surplus toward tax relief. The LAT and
Wall Street Journal point out that the main
political objective of the Republicans was to have an agreed-upon bill on the
table to enable them to use the summer recess to build popular anti-veto
pressure on Clinton.
The only real departure from the reporting template comes with the
WP's observation that high-tech lobbyists have been working feverishly
for months to incorporate into the bill its R and D tax credit, a feature the
paper calls a "particularly glittering prize." The paper notes that the Silicon
artists have included a former aide to Dick Armey and the brother of the White
House chief of staff.
A WSJ front-page feature notes that even without such new wrinkles,
the tax code allows many corporations to legally pay little or no federal income tax. More
than half the nation's corporations, says the Journal , quoting a GAO
study, paid no federal income tax at all between 1989 and 1995. And in 1998,
says the paper, General Motors managed to get itself in the 0.8 percent tax
bracket. (This story is a dramatic reminder of the difference between the
Journal's news and editorial pages.)
The WP and LAT front a fresh study from the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, appearing in today's JAMA , with a
counterintuitive result: a significant decline in high-school violence in the
1990s. One possible explanation of the disconnect that the stories don't
address: that the study ends with data from 1997, and 1998 and 1999 have been
marked by some major school shootings.
Another JAMA study, written up at the WP and NYT ,
calculates that the cost of treating the nation's gunshot wounds for a recent
year, 1994, was $2.3 billion. Half of that cost, says the study, was ultimately
borne by the government. The average cost of a gunshot wound that requires a
hospital visit is $14,600 for emergency care and $35,400 for lifetime follow-up
care.
The NYT , LAT , and USAT front, and the WP stuffs,
word that an arbitration panel has ruled that the government must pay the heirs
of Abraham Zapruder $16 million for the movie he shot of the Kennedy
assassination. The Zapruder family had been asking for $30 million and the
government had been offering $1 million.
The NYT runs a Reuters dispatch noting Mattel's announcement that it
will be licensing Barbie and Hot Wheels to a computer manufacturer. The Barbie
computers will be silver with pink and purple floral accents and will come with
a Barbie Digital Camera and a flowered Barbie mouse. The Hot Wheels model will
feature the toy's flame logo and a steering wheel.
The lead editorial at the LAT reminds that it's been almost six years
since Newt Gingrich promised to post all congressional proceedings on the
Internet and almost four since the passage of the Electronic Freedom of
Information Act, which required all federal agencies to grant Americans prompt
access to relevant information in their databases. The paper observes that most
branches of the U.S. government stand in violation of the Act. The Supreme
Court of Mongolia has a Web site, says the LAT , but the U.S. Supreme
Court does not.
