Having come up with something simple anyone with a smartphone can do to derail conservative talking points about Obama destroying the economy, I thought I'd put a little more here.
If your conservative relatives are smart, they'll stop talking at this point and ask for another slice of pie. If not, they'll probably go into total rejectionist mode, screaming about fiscal cliffs, Europe, and unemployment. You can have more fun at this point.
Point out for example if they think we have to cut back on government spending and start making people pay more for stuff, that's exactly what Europe is doing. Their unemployment is soaring, their deficits are exploding, and their economies are sliding back into recession. We had a stimulus which was actually much smaller than it should have been - they didn't do a stimulus at all. Whose economy has been slowly but steadily improving?
If they ask "What about jobs?" ask them right back - yeah, what about jobs? Wall Street and the big corporations seem to have as much money as ever - so why aren't they hiring? Could it be they LIKE high unemployment because they can tell their workers to take pay cuts or be replaced by somebody who'll work for even less? Ask why the private sector would even care about creating jobs when they're making as much money as ever?
Point out if all the city, county, and state workers (you know firemen, police, teachers, etc.) who lost their jobs because of cuts in government spending in the last 4 years were back at work, unemployment would be a lot lower. Not just for them mind you, but for all the people they used to be able to buy stuff from too. Maybe government can create jobs???
Here's a test question. Assuming they're not in a top tax bracket, ask them if they'd turn down a dollar if it put them above the $250,000 line into a higher tax rate. If they don't understand that the higher rate would only apply to that one dollar, well... Sara Robinson took this issue apart back in 2010 and it's an even more important read now than it was then. Robinson picks up a study from You.gov that makes the point:
Any idea what proportion of American families make more than $250,000 a year? Or, to potentially make it easier, any idea what proportion of families in your state make more than $250,000 a year?
Don't feel bad if you don't know—most people don't. The actual number, nationwide is somewhere less than 3% of families earn more than $250,000 a year. What did the survey respondents say when asked this question? The average response was close to 17%!—meaning your typical survey respondent thinks that almost 1 in 5 families in America earn that kind of money, when the answer is closer to 1 in 50!
And Robinson's got more good stuff. The $250,000 talking points come from part two of a series -
Part 1 is here, and it blows apart some other common myths. It's a great tool for dealing with all the sheer nonsense being spread about the fiscal cliff and the totally false picture of the budget that the media is spreading these days. (
CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley is especially egregious - they actually asked the head of
Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein what we should know about the fiscal cliff!!! They turned to the CEO of Honeywell for his expertise;
Must address Medicare-medicaid! The BS in CBS might as well stand for
Bowles and Simpson. The C is a tossup between Corporate, CEO, or Capitalist.)
Robinson lays out in detail in Part 1 The Myth of the Self Made American all of the false assumptions and BS behind the Grand Bargain logic to address the Fiscal Cliff with the wrong answers. Her summary contains 3 points that bear repeating, because it underlines the bankruptcy of the Austerity Chorus.
Progressives know the truth: Nobody in America ever did it alone, for themselves. For the past 220 years, we've done it together, for each other. Bringing that interdependence back out into the light and putting at the center of our politics shifts the entire dialogue in ways that can help the progressives over the long haul, in at least three ways.
First, it reaffirms the democratic social contract. From the arrogant Wall Street bankers who still think they deserve bonuses for tanking the economy to the furious white men of the Tea Party, people who've convinced themselves that nobody ever gave them anything are justified (at least in their own minds) in deciding that they don't owe anything to anyone else, either. And as long as they can keep the "self-made" lie going, they'll also go on believing that they're totally exempt from the whole social contract on which a democracy runs.
Second: It calls the conservatives' politics-of-rage game. The self-made myth allows the conservative movement to keep feeding on the fury of aggrieved people who falsely think they're getting nothing for something, even while they're standing on a pile of wealth that we helped put under their feet. Setting the record straight on exactly what they did get for their tax dollars removes a lot of the justification for this outrage, and makes them look like the tantrum-throwing spoiled brats they are.
Third: It demands that people give credit where credit is due. Nothing changes until those of us who've paid our share of taxes, worked hard and played by the rules, struggled to raise sound families and build decent communities, and served our country at home and abroad start demanding acknowledgment, respect, and a proper "Thank you" for everything we've each contributed to make so much mutual success possible. And the real patriot is the one who always makes sure that Uncle Sam himself is the very first one to stand for applause.
Now, conservatives have worked very hard at not knowing these points, so don't expect the battle to be over any time soon. Again, if you need more resources, Dave Johnson has links to
some good stuff right here. And again,
Sara Robinson Talks Turkey.
The most concise way to dispose of the Fiscal Cliff boils down to this: Take care of jobs, and the Fiscal Cliff will take care of itself. Instead of worrying about deficits ten twenty, thirty years down the road, put people back to work NOW. To paraphrase John Galt for some advice to conservatives, "The election is over. Get the HELL out of our way!"