And What To Replace Them With
We talk about the “Death Tax” and not “Estate Tax.” Two little words “Death Panels” were capable of nearly derailing the best thing that’s happened to health insurance in this country in decades. Harvard-educated President Obama is universally considered “elite,” while Yale-educated George W. Bush is considered “down home.”
Many Democrats buy into the old saw that the Democratic party has had a history of “tax and spend” policies that needs to change or be lived down somehow. Until the Occupy movement brought the topic front and center, even most Democrats accepted the notion that businesses were “job creators” and worried more about distracting the opposition from this “fact” than debunking it for the lie it actually is.
Unfortunately, this is because Democrats have failed to speak in a language strong enough to rebut Republicans who have defined who we are and what we want, in a way that doesn’t even remotely reflect an iota of the truth, and instantly conjures up the negative in the mind of the listener.
HOW TO TALK LIKE A REPUBLICAN
Professional media strategist Frank Luntz has been providing Republicans with a detailed handbook on exactly what language to use and not to use for decades. He has built up a lexicon that is not only far-reaching and deeply ingrained, but also very, very successful. As Progressive Democratic linguist George Lakoff explains it, this “framing” is crucial to how they’ve managed to win so much of the debate.
Here are some examples from Luntz’s handbooks, of how the Republican party has been taught to frame the way they talk:
Don’t say “bonus!”Luntz advised that if [corporations] give their employees an income boost during the holiday season, they should never refer to it as a “bonus.”
“If you give out a bonus at a time of financial hardship, yo4’re going to make people angry. It’s ‘pay for performance.'”
Don’t say that the government “taxes the rich.”This sleight-of-tongue has managed to manipulate at least half the country into believing things that simply are not true. And this type of language mash-up has been so successfully drilled into the vernacular, that Democrats have been hard-pressed to come up with a simple and just-as-effective way to expose the lies beneath them.Instead, tell [people] that the government “takes from the rich.”
“If you talk about raising taxes on the rich,” the public responds favorably, Luntz cautioned. But “if you talk about government taking the money from hardworking Americans, the public says no.”
See the 5 Words Democrats Should Never Say Again after the jump.
DEMOCRATS NEED A HANDBOOK OF OUR OWN
How can Democrats and Progressives fix this? Start by never saying any of the following five words or phrases again.
1. Never say Entitlements.
Instead, say Earned Benefits.
While the word “entitlement” was originally coined by Democrats as a way to illustrate that the receiver of the attached benefits was entitled to them by having worked to earn them, or having been taxed to support them, it has been re-defined by the right as akin to a spoiled child who acts as if they’re “entitled” even though they are not.
“Earned benefits,” on the other hand, cannot be twisted or misconstrued to mean anything other than what what they are: something the recipient has actually earned, as opposed to something they are being given. Social Security and Medicare are paid into through taxes deducted from employees’ paychecks, or the paychecks of one’s spouse or parent. No one who hasn’t either personally paid into these programs, or been the spouse or child of someone who has paid into these programs, or, in the case of Medicare Part B, paid a monthly premium in order to receive them, can extract benefits from these programs.
Here is a perfect example of how the right wing uses the word “entitled” as a pejorative associated with Democrats (emphasis mine):
“Fluke is an entitled liberal, which is both emblematically typical and essentially required for one to be a liberal in today’s American political landscape … Her talking points represent a very real attitude quickly manifesting itself into mainstream American thought process: that a person literally deserves the resources of another. This, of course, is the entitlement and dependency culture on which the Democratic Party has rallied around, encouraged, campaigned, and insisted.“Democrats have done nothing of the sort. Recall that the subject at hand is insured individuals. That means that they have paid into the pool in order to be able to take resources out later when needed. Even if the check was dispersed by their employer, it’s still their benefit as employees, paid out in the form of insurance coverage in lieu of cash compensation. Not to mention any shared responsibility the employee, or in Sandra Fluke’s case, the student, may have in paying the monthly premium. (For the record, students at Georgetown University where Sandra Fluke is a student, pay 100% of their own premium toward their student health insurance.)Do not allow the right wing to frame this issue in their terms. These are Earned Benefits. Say that.
2. Never say Redistribution of Wealth.
Instead, say Fair Wages For Work.
When we hear “redistribution,” we think in terms of simply moving things around, not something earned by someone. And when you tack the word “wealth” onto it, everybody’s hackles immediately go up. “What do you mean, redistribute my wealth? You don’t get to take something from me and give it to someone else! I work hard for what I get; let other people work for their own money, not mine!”
But when we hear “fair wages for work,” we know instantly that we are talking about paying working people a fair wage for the work they’re doing, not giving them something they haven’t actually earned. Since at least 1965, Republican policies have created a corporate culture that only rewards those at the very, very, very top of the pyramid. While the average “hourly wage” equivalent for CEOs has gone from $490.31 to $5,419.97 ($11,273,537.00 / year), the average hourly wage for workers has stagnated at $19.71. That’s just $40,997.00 / year. The same $40,997.00 that we were earning in 1965. At 2012 inflation. We need fair wages for our work* in today’s dollars. Say that.
3. Never say Employer Paid Health Insurance.
Instead, say Employee Earned Health Insurance.
When we say “employer paid,” we immediately think of it as something that’s given to the employee by their employer. But as I pointed out in my blog post, “It’s Not About Who Writes The Check—Stop The Republican Lie About Who Pays For Contraceptives,” all employee health insurance is earned by virtue of the employee’s labor. That makes it “paid for” by the employee, even if they aren’t the ones writing the checks to the insurance companies themselves. Employee health insurance is just one of several forms of compensation in exchange for labor, that include cash, retirement funds, long- and short-term disability coverage, etc.
Employee health insurance is not a “gift,” it is compensation in exchange for labor. Cease the labor and the compensation ceases right along with it. Employees earn their insurance. Say that.
4. Never say Government Spending.
Instead, say we Invest in America.
When we hear “spending,” we automatically think of going shopping and whipping out the credit card. And while government at every level often leverages their ability to borrow at low interest rates to fund their spending, it’s hardly the same thing as going out and buying a dress you’re only going to wear once and then hanging in the closet until it’s out of style.
What governments actually do is invest in our cities, states, country and our people. Government invests in infrastructure that affords us the ability to move around freely. It invests in programs that train people with job skills. It invests in research that cures diseases. There is an actual benefit to “spending” when a government does it, which actually makes it an investment in all our futures.
And who is “the government”? We The People. It’s a Constitutional phrase that evokes strong support for whatever follows. Democrats need to take Constitutional language back from the Republican party and make it ours again, since Democratic principles of equality and liberty were the driving forces behind the creation of this great nation in the first place.
We are investing in our future.
Say it this way. Every time.
5. Never say Corporate America.
Instead, say Unelected Corporate Government.
Calling businesses “Corporate America” gives the impression that somehow corporations are the same as human Americans. But in spite of what the current Supreme Court would have you believe, they aren’t.
In fact, in many ways in our daily lives, we are governed far more by corporations than we are by governments. Corporations govern where we shop, what we pay for goods and services, who gets access and who doesn’t, how we communicate and what we pay for that privilege, and so on.
But more importantly, Corporations govern us by buying our legislators to do their bidding with campaign donations, and by actually writing legislation that makes it into our law books. Corporations govern when they privatize formerly-public, taxpayer-funded institutions, like schools, prisons and military operations. And unlike actual governments, they do it solely for their benefit and profits, not those of real American citizens.
And if there’s one thing we know the right wing zealots claim not to like the most, it’s “government interference in our lives.” So what’s worse than the government we actually elect to make our laws “interfering in our lives”? It’s a government structure that we didn’t even elect interfering in our lives.
Corporations are not “Corporate America,” they are Unelected Corporate Government. Describe them that way and people will come to resent their presence in our public policy-making.
In closing, turning once again to Professor Lakoff, “Unfortunately, Luntz is still ahead of most progressives responding to him. Progressives need to learn how framing works. Bashing Luntz, bashing Fox News, bashing the right-wing pundits and leaders using their frames and arguing against their positions just keeps their frames in play. … Progressives have magnificent stories of their own to tell. They need to be telling them nonstop. Let’s lure the right into using OUR frames in public discourse.”
Let’s start doing that by never saying any of the above five words and phrases again.
Category: Economics / Economy / Income / Financial
IMPEACH BIDEN!!? | Christopher Titus | Armageddon Update
The Insane Fearmongering Over Retail Crime Was ALL BULL$*%#
Meanwhile, On Fox Business News…
Even the Fox reporter had to admit there was no evidence that there was any crime at all by President Biden. Yet the Republicans are being pushed hard by tRump to make sure they impeach Biden before the general election, so tRump can claim Biden was impeached also. Also, a Fox host had to admit the economy was doing well. Hugs. Scottie
Column: An exhaustive debunking of the dumbest myths about Social Security
Thanks to Ten Bears for the link. This article debunks a lot of the myths pushed by republicans and the wealthy about social security and those that receive it. This article shows how most social security recipients receive about 20 grand a year, which in most places is not enough to survive in this profit is king country, many receive far less. The article removes that idea that to save the fund we must raise the age. It also shows how the Alan Simpson’s views are flawed and wrong. Below is a quote from the article. What they don’t mention is medicare and and part D is deducted from the monthly amount, and every time people on Scocial Security get a cost of living raise the premum for Medicare goes up also, some times more than the raise. Think about what that means. It means we who are on Scocial Security fall further behind every year. Hugs. Scottie
The average Social Security monthly check is $1,709.70, which works out to $20,516 a year. That’s about $800 more than the federal poverty line for a family of two.
———————————————————————————————————
Blank Social Security checks await processing for many of the program’s more than 65 million beneficiaries.(Bradley C Bower / Associated Press)Myths and canards about Social Security and its supposed fiscal troubles have steadily proliferated over the years. But it’s rare to find them all concentrated in one place as they were in a recent article on the online news site Slate.
Slate paired Eric Boehm, a writer for the conservative magazine Reason, with a writer named Celeste Headlee for a dialogue titled “Social Security Doesn’t Make Sense Anymore.” The roughly 2,000-word piece contained so many misconceptions, inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and flat-out lies about the program that I almost gave up counting. That said, it’s perhaps worthwhile to have a one-stop shop for all these sophistries, if only for the purpose of debunking them en masse.
Most people 65 and older receive the majority of their income from Social Security.
— Kathleen Romig tells the truth about Social Security that Slate missed
The article called for a “radical rethink” of Social Security to make it somehow more relevant to Americans in the modern world. Boehm and Headlee evidently think that’s a world in which America is on the brink of insolvency and can’t afford to spend another dime on the disadvantaged, that Social Security recipients are rich, and that older Americans can have their pick of jobs that will keep them happy and healthy indefinitely.
Slate says their dialogue was “edited for clarity,” but the only thing it made clear is that neither of them knows the first thing about Social Security. More alarming, they showed no inclination to learn.
There isn’t space here or time for me to list every solecism in the piece, so I will focus on some of the most egregious errors.
—“People who are young and working … are funding the retirement of generally wealthier Americans.” This notion was popularized by former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.), who went around calling Social Security beneficiaries “greedy geezers” and disdained the program as “a milk cow with 310 million tits.”
The underlying idea is that the average Social Security beneficiaries are doing better than the poor souls in the working class who are paying for their lives of leisure through their payroll taxes. It’s commonly reported that retirees are, on average, the wealthiest cohort of Americans.
Here’s what’s wrong with that idea: The reason that so many seniors are able to live comfortably is because they receive Social Security.
As Kathleen Romig of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has reported, “most people 65 and older receive the majority of their income from Social Security.” The poverty rate among Americans older than 65 is 10.3%. Without Social Security, it would be nearly 38%. To put it another way, Social Security keeps more than 15 million seniors out of poverty.
The average Social Security monthly check is $1,709.70, which works out to $20,516 a year. That’s about $800 more than the federal poverty line for a family of two.
The idea that cutting off the wealthiest seniors or at least reducing their benefits would help save Social Security is a popular myth, with recipients like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates the most common illustrative targets. The goal is to promote “means-testing” the program.
But myth it is. As of 2017, about 47,500 millionaires were receiving Social Security. Their total benefits came to about $1.4 billion, or about 15 hundredths of a percent of the $941 billion in benefits the system paid out that year. If you’re intent on “saving” Social Security by means-testing, you would need to start cutting off or reducing benefits for recipients earning about $70,000 a year in non-Social Security income — not millionaires.
Boehm backed up his thoughts on this topic with some suspect data. He cites the Federal Reserve in asserting that “the average value of a retired person’s assets” today is $538,000. Hmm. My reading of the Fed’s latest digest from its Survey of Consumer Finances, issued just last month, places the median net worth of those aged 65-74 at about $410,000; for those 75 and older, it’s $335,600.
Does that make them rich? Using the common rule of thumb that one can spend 4% a year of retirement savings to have the best chance of not outliving your nest egg, $410,000 produces $16,400 a year. Not the basis of a lavish lifestyle. Even a nest egg of $538,000 doesn’t make for a life of leisure — in one’s first year of retirement the 4% rule would yield $21,520.
—Just raise the retirement age? Boehm: “When Social Security began, you could get benefits at age 65, but the average life expectancy in this country was like 61. So the average person actually died before they qualified for Social Security.” This is another quacking canard from the Simpson duck pond.
Average life expectancy from birth in 1940, when the first Social Security checks went out, was about 63 and a half, which I suppose is “like” 61. But that figure was skewed lower by high infant mortality; Boehm acknowledges this, but doesn’t bother to explore its ramifications, perhaps because it explodes his take.
For Americans who made it to their first birthday back then, average life expectancy was nearly 66. For those entering their working careers, say at age 20—the relevant cohort for assessing the chances of collecting Social Security — it was nearly 69.
In other words, the average person did not actually die before qualifying for Social Security; the average person collected for years. Indeed, those who were 65 in the late 1930s lived on average nearly to 78.
Anyway, life expectancy is closely connected to race, educational attainment and income. Those who live longest are whites, college graduates and the affluent. Raising the retirement age is a curse on those who don’t fall into those categories. White people aged 65 have gained more than six years of longevity since the 1930s; Black males only about four years.
By the way, what are workers supposed to do while they’re waiting longer to reach retirement age? Leaving aside the impact of age discrimination that makes it harder for older people to obtain or keep jobs, the Census Bureau has reported that more than half of all workers aged 58 or older were in physically demanding jobs or jobs with difficult working conditions — more than 13 million workers.
As economists Cherrie Bucknor and Dean Baker pointed out in a 2016 paper, “the workers who were most likely to be in these jobs were Latinos, the least educated (less than a high school diploma), immigrants, and the lowest wage earners.”
I don’t know what Boehm’s working conditions are like, but I’d bet they don’t “require dynamic, explosive, static, or trunk strength, bending or twisting of the body, stamina, maintaining balance, or kneeling or crouching” or involve “exposure to abnormal temperatures, contaminants, hazardous equipment, whole body vibration, or distracting or uncomfortable noise.” It’s easy to think that everyone else should work harder, if your frame of reference is your own office desk.
—Social Security is “a welfare program”: Boehm pushed this idea hard. “You would never build a welfare program, you would never get Congress to approve the construction of a new welfare program, that took money directly from the paychecks of workers and transferred it to a wealthy cohort somewhere in this country,” he says.
There’s a manifest danger in calling Social Security a welfare program. That’s because welfare programs are easiest to axe when conservatives go hunting for budget cuts — Americans typically view them as serving layabouts and malingerers at their expense.
Social Security is nothing like a welfare program, however. It’s a contributory system, funded entirely by its beneficiaries through the payroll tax. Its benefits are tied to lifetime contributions. That’s why billionaires get it, too — they contributed to it during their working lives. Nor is it only an old-age pension: It encompasses disability benefits and insurance to cover spouses and children when their breadwinner suffers an untimely death.
Before Republicans started casting “entitlements” as a dirty word, Americans saw their entitlement to Social Security benefits as a blessing — most still do. They’re entitled to it because they’ve paid for it with every paycheck.
The idea that the system represents a war between seniors and younger generations is just wrong. Whatever fiscal problems face Social Security, it’s because it’s exploited by the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
In 1937, when the payroll tax was first collected, it applied to about 92% of all earned income. By 2020, that figure had fallen to 83%, largely because of an increase in income inequality. Were the payroll tax to be restructured to cover 90% of earnings, as the Congressional Budget Office reported last year, that would produce an additional $670 billion in revenue over 10 years; raise it to cover all annual earnings over $250,000, the gain would be $1.2 trillion — all without cutting benefits by even a penny.
—Social Security “is going to hit a brick wall in the 2030s.” This is Boehm’s gloss on the familiar projection that the program’s trust fund will run out some time in the middle of that decade. Is that a “brick wall”? Hardly: At that point, the program will still be guaranteed enough revenues to continue paying three-quarters of all scheduled benefits.
That’s a middle-of-the-road estimate. The system’s actuaries have also projected that given alternative demographic and economic assumptions — including assuming the unemployment rate and economy stay where they are today and immigration rises closer to its historical norm, the program might even be able to pay all benefits indefinitely.
—”The cost of Social Security is … ballooning quite rapidly”: This holds no water at all. The CBO projects that Social Security benefits as a share of gross domestic product, currently 5.1%, will rise to 6.2% by 2053. If that’s a balloon, it’s inflating pretty slowly.
In that time span, incidentally, GDP will more than triple to $79.5 trillion from $26.2 trillion, according to the CBO.
Boehm’s argument is that Social Security is becoming such a fiscal burden that it’s “killing the safety net.” He says, “There’s not enough money to go around,” which is absurd to say about the richest nation in world history. He says the cost of Social Security and Medicare, which he seems to think, erroneously, are related programs, is “pushing other things to the budget into a territory where we have to borrow more money to pay for them.”
That’s obviously not so. We wouldn’t have to borrow if we took such reasonable steps as repealing the 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the rich that drove a hole into the federal budget, or started charging the wealthy for their fair share of Social Security. He mentions that Americans have experienced “decades of greater prosperity,” but not that the benefits of that prosperity have been collected overwhelmingly by the 1%.
Boehm and Headlee plainly intended to tell it like it is on Social Security. Unfortunately, their effort was hampered by lack of information. Would it have killed them to do even a little research?
GOP Can’t Stop Humiliating Themselves With Biden Impeachment Evidence
Let’s talk about a question on Ukrainian aid….
‘They Came in the Dark’: Settler Violence Intensifies in the West Bank
Comer’s Latest Biden ‘Bombshell’ Appears to Be Nothing More Than Hunter Repaying $4,000 in Car Payments
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
On Monday, Rep. James Comer (R-KY) and the House Oversight Committee released a new piece of “evidence” claiming that Hunter Biden was funneling money to his father, President Joe Biden, but a tiny bit more investigating proved it wasn’t much of a bombshell after all.
The new “evidence” was touted on the Oversight Committee’s social media and was accompanied by a video of Comer explaining that it proved President Biden was receiving “DIRECT monthly payments” from his son through his company Owasco. The evidence they presented were bank documents:
But upon closer examination, and after further investigation by journalists and intrepid Twitter/X users, the amount of the deposits from son to father that took place in 2018-2019 was only about $4,000 (to be specific, three payments of $1,380) that were repayment for money Hunter borrowed during a transitional financial patch for a Ford Raptor truck:
What this actually proves is that Hunter Biden made good on a loan from his father, and kept track of these repayments on an actual spreadsheet. That doesn’t really paint a picture of a corrupt financial scheme, but if you squint really hard and look through the picture instead of directly at it, then it might look sketchy enough to convince Walmart shoppers.
Comer Busted Lying About Hunter Biden’s Car Payments
The Washington Post reports:
In an email to reporters, a spokesperson for Comer claimed that the House Oversight Committee, which is investigating Biden, had obtained bank records revealing that Hunter Biden’s law firm, Owasco PC, which had received payments from Chinese-state-linked companies and other foreign companies in the past, made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden.
The email claimed the payments “are part of a pattern revealing Joe Biden knew about, participated in and benefited from his family’s influence-peddling schemes.”
The three payments of $1,380 that occurred in September, October and November 2018 — nearly two years after Biden had left the vice presidency — were actually for a 2018 Ford Raptor truck Joe Biden had purchased that Hunter Biden was using, according to an email verified by a Washington Post forensic analysis.
Read the full article.
Oh, and it will stick, baby.
Gotta give FOX and the other bigot spigots something to spew, folks are getting tired of panda sex. And they sure as hell don’t want to hear the truth about the Zieglers.
OMG, Biden helped his son with car payments, that Hunter paid back. IMPEACH!!
I’m going to have my grandma exhumed for impeachment since she did the same for me when I was young.
Clinton and Obama both have cars. It’s clearly a pattern of conspiracy.
What a piece of human scum, Comer is.
Just when you think you’ve encountered the lowest of the low Republican scum, along comes a Comer.
Just have faith in the GOP. They’ll always find someone stupider, and more dishonest.
It’s amazing that according to Republicans, Joe Biden is both senile and a clever mastermind at the same time.
Though common for fascist movements – the “enemy” is both savvy and incompetent, so it must be destroyed before it destroys those listening to the fascist leaders, and is weak enough to be destroyed if enough ‘patriots’ rise up together.
From the linked Washington Post story.
A spokesperson for the Oversight Committee used the fact that the payments came from one of Hunter Biden’s accounts that also included money from a Chinese energy conglomerate to suggest something more nefarious than they have so far proved.
“There is now a pattern of members of the Biden family using their bank accounts that have been funded by Chinese and other foreign entities to send money to Joe Biden,” the spokesperson said. “Based on witness testimony, Joe Biden knew and participated in his family’s influence-peddling schemes. The checks and payments we’ve uncovered reveal Joe Biden benefited from them.”
Comer has consistently oversold or misrepresented the committee’s investigative findings as he has argued to initiate impeachment proceedings. Last month, Comer trumpeted a $200,000 loan repayment Joe Biden received from his brother James Biden. Comer sought to paint the personal check in nefarious terms, alleging without evidence that it showed that Joe Biden had indirectly received payments from his family’s foreign business dealings.
When presented with a bank record of the wire payment that showed the $200,000 payment to James Biden had originated from the president’s attorney trust account, Comer baselessly accused the law firm representing Joe Biden of money laundering.
[Bolding mine.]
And, still, to call that “oversold and misrepresented” is such a mild description of what they are doing. They are lying and contorting to make a nefarious and unfounded case, but media and journalists are largely unwilling to clear about that. They shouldn’t be. Like so much else in reporting about politics, they are playing with journalistic malpractice under the guise of factual and ethical reporting (which it is not).
Comer is a moron. But that isn’t news, is it?
He, George Santos and Marjorie Taylor Greene are today’s Republican Party.
As usual, I can’t decide if he’s a moron that morons follow, or if he’s savvy and playing the moron to get the morons to follow. Probably shades of both, along with a hefty dose of confirmation bias and sunk cost fallacy pushing him along.
He needs to keep Hunter Biden and dollar signs in the same sentence, to keep the magats’ balls in a constant uproar.
His theories get exploded faster than Elon’s rockets
But, they more fizzle out rather than explode, no?
Coming soon:
Scottie's Playtime 