This is about as dead a time as one could hope to find on this here website, so it seems like a good time to discuss political messaging in relation to the tax cut debate during the post-election session of Congress. That's my idea of a good holiday Friday night, and if you're here it's no doubt yours. And by "it's no doubt," I mean "I'm going to pretend it is."
We already have popular opinion behind us on the issue of passing Obama tax cuts on the first $250,000 of income to replace Bush tax cuts on any amount of income evenly divisible by the number 1. What we may not have enough of is popular resentment of what the Republicans are trying to do here.
I was thinking about this recently and realized that one word might help us build up the resentment of unfairness of what the Republicans are doing.
That word is "extra."
That's "extra" as in: "We want to pass a tax cut for the first $250,000 of everyone's income. We do not want to pass an EXTRA tax cut solely for the wealthy."
When you put it that way, it sounds easy to understand, doesn't it? Republicans hate that!
You'd think that this would be pretty obvious, implicating the idea of "fairness" as it does.
And, indeed, the Google shows 231,000 hits for the phrase "extra tax cut."
That's great! The bad news, however, is that for the past month there are only 310 hits. That's bad.
It so happens that the third and fourth top hits for the phrase "extra top cuts" are from this radical socialist jihadist website called "The Daily Kos."
Jed Lewison used the phrase on Nov. 19. in his story "The only way to lose the tax cut debate is to cave".
And, to my dismay if I were trying to claim to be original here, but I'm not, although I didn't see the diary when I started composing this one, a Koster named cp1919 -- a real old timer, too, with a UID under 3000 -- had this exact same idea on Nov 12 in the diary "One word to decouple middle class tax cut: 'EXTRA'".
Why I am (without having intended to) stealing cp1919's idea? Two reasons:
(1) the diary only got seven comments, although all were duly appreciative, and
(2) the phrase "extra tax cut" has only been used online 310 times in the past month.
So, folks, I'm changing my tag line through the expiration of the 111th session of Congress or until we win this one:
It's not a "tax cut for the wealthy."
It's an "extra tax cut for the wealthy.
And an extra helping for those who don't need the help is, among other things, unfair.
If you like the framing, let's make sure that it has more than 310 hits for the past month on Google. (Or, I suppose, 311 after I hit publish.)
(UPDATE: Wouldn't fit with the link included. Went with "No EXTRA tax cut for the wealthy" instead.)
HUGE UPDATE! Must credit Barack Obama!
Here's what some guy named Barack Obama had to say on Tuesday in Kokomo (I hadn't seen this before):
"This is actually an area where Democrats and Republicans agree," he said. "The only place where we disagree is whether we can afford to also borrow $700 billion to pay for an extra tax cut for the wealthiest Americans -- millionaires and billionaires. I don't think we can afford (that) right now."
Great! But this leads to the obvious question: why were there still only 310 hits on Google in the past month for the phrase "extra tax cut" when even the President has used it! This is an instance where we can all agree to have the President's back -- and get this phrase into the popular discourse NOW NOW NOW!
ANOTHER UPDATE! bensdad has his own framing idea on the topic. I goaded him to write a diary on it and he did. You should read it and take his poll! Let the best idea -- or ideas -- go forth!