Thursday, January 30, 2003
Loaded language
An undeniable success of the reactionaries is that they have consistently been able to frame issues in terms of their choosing. I have no insight as to why that’s the case—are ad agencies hotbeds of ideological neo-conservatism?—but you can’t get around the fact.
The clearest recent example is the loaded phrase death tax, used to disparage and overturn the estate tax. By the way, is the world outside of Washington state aware that William Gates Sr., Bill’s dad, is strongly and publicly opposed to estate tax repeal? A recent Seattle Times story about that topic is here. In fact Gates Sr., who recently chaired a statewide special commission that recommended introducing a state income tax, has even co-authored a new book in support of retaining the estate tax.
The conservatives won control of pro-life ages ago, leaving the progressives with pro-choice, a term that’s certainly descriptive of our position but not the winner when it comes to snappy advertising sloganeering.
Even when the loaded term-of-choice is objectively negative in its implications, the reactionaries embrace it and, amazingly, are able to convince large segments of the population that it’s a valid, positive selling point for their position. The phrase I’m thinking of in this instance is trickle-down economics. The Reaganites were proud as punch of that phrase, trumpeting it proudly. But doesn’t it really tell us unashamedly that the intent of their policy of cutting rich people’s taxes was to allow a mere dribble of financial wherewithall to reach the general public? What was (and still is) needed was gush-down or cascade-down, yet the Republicans somehow managed to frame the discourse in their own favor so thoroughly that the public accepted the scraps tossed their way as if they were receiving a huge windfall from on high.
And now we come to double-taxed dividends, marketed as if it’s the only class of income that is potentially subject to taxation at more than one point in the financial system.
I can offer no reasonable avenues for progressives to explore to counteract this phenomenon. I merely observe (and rue) it.
