It’s an amusing little story, but it’s not the real story of how the Cares Act got distorted beyond what should have been its intent. In the real story, Republicans were the ones who got gifts for their friends, gifts that could be hugely profitable. But the fact that everyone heard about the Kennedy Center shows who the brilliant public relations tacticians in Washington are.

First let’s note this report from The Post:

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More than 80 percent of the benefits of a tax change tucked into the coronavirus relief package Congress passed last month will go to those who earn more than $1 million annually, according to a report by a nonpartisan congressional body expected to be released Tuesday. The provision, inserted into the legislation by Senate Republicans, temporarily suspends a limitation on how much owners of businesses formed as “pass-through” entities can deduct against their nonbusiness income, such as capital gains, to reduce their tax liability. The limitation was created as part of the 2017 Republican tax law to offset other tax cuts to firms in that legislation. Suspending the limitation will cost taxpayers about $90 billion in 2020 alone, part of a set of tax changes that will add close to $170 billion to the national deficit over the next 10 years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), the nonpartisan congressional body.

Who are the biggest beneficiaries of this tax change? The hard-working, pickup-driving, dirt-under-their-fingernails real Americans whom Republicans are always holding up as the embodiment of America’s true spirit? Nope, it’s real estate and hedge-fund investors.

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Now let’s note a second story: David Dayen of the American Prospect obtained audio of a conference call in which a Treasury Department official tells banks that when people start getting those $1,200 direct deposits, the banks can seize part or all of them to pay old debts or fees the recipients have built up. In other words, the banks are getting what they want in the implementation of this law. What an unexpected turn of events.

Now let’s return to that Kennedy Center story. When the Cares Act was being considered, among the list of items in the Democrats’ version of the bill was $35 million for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which was intended to help the institution deal with the effects of the coronavirus ($25 million ended up being included in the bill). The objections were immediate, loud and ubiquitous. Pork! Pet projects! Waste! Why oh why couldn’t Democrats just concentrate on saving the economy?

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This is a time-honored strategy, one Republicans are particularly adept at deploying. If you want to discredit a bill or a proposal from the other side, you don’t have to attack the whole thing. All you have to do is find one component, no matter how tiny (the funding for the Kennedy Center ended up amounting to about one one-thousandth of 1 percent of the total cost of the bill), then use that as a symbol of the whole misbegotten effort and your opponents’ dirty hands. The more absurd that one provision can be made to sound, the better.

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In this case, not only did Republicans bring up the Kennedy Center whenever they spoke about the rescue package, the outrage was echoed by every conservative news organization and pundit in the land. The impression left was that Republicans were the responsible ones and Democrats just wanted to lard up the bill with their own irrelevant priorities.

While you can certainly criticize the Kennedy Center funding (and other things Democrats suggested), the fact remains that they wanted to be much more aggressive than Republicans in mitigating the effects of both the pandemic and the recession.

But the Kennedy Center story stuck. And Republican efforts to make sure the bill did things such as give away $90 billion just this year to wealthy people with just one little tax change? Nobody noticed.

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It’s not that Democrats don’t try to play this P.R. game, because they do. They just aren’t quite as good at it as Republicans are. And they don’t have the same ferociously loyal media apparatus to amplify their message as persistently as Fox News and conservative talk radio do for Republicans. Often, that determines what we know and what we remember.

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