unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [20]
The term “death tax” was an intentional misnomer: obviously, what’s being taxed isn’t death, but bequeathed wealth. Nevertheless, the tactic worked. In 2001 the Republican-controlled Congress approved a gradual phase-down and temporary repeal, which will become permanent if foes of the tax get their way.
Why did this tactic work? The Republican strategist Frank Luntz explains. “The public wouldn’t support it [repeal] because the word ‘estate’ sounds wealthy,” he told an interviewer for the PBS documentary series Frontline in 2004. But call it a death tax, he added, “and suddenly something that isn’t viable achieves the support of 75 percent of the American people. It’s the same tax, but nobody really knows what an estate is. But they certainly know what it means to be taxed when you die.”
Although the term “death tax” was misleading, it framed the issue in a way that made people think of the tax unfavorably even before they considered any facts. A simple rule of persuasion holds, “Frame the issue, claim the issue.” Some supporters of the estate tax later regretted they had been so slow to frame the issue their way, as the “Paris Hilton tax cut.” Indeed, in 2006 the Coalition for America’s Priorities ran TV and radio ads calling estate tax repeal a giveaway to “billionaires and heiresses.” The radio ad featured a Hilton imitator praising the Senate as “awesome” for considering repeal: “So what that gas is over three dollars a gallon? Like…use a credit card!” As we write this, Congress is still debating whether to repeal the tax permanently or just narrow it radically to a very few, very rich families. Either way, the “death tax” misnomer was a powerful weapon that the other side was slow to counter.
Democrats had better luck framing an issue when they attacked President Bush’s Social Security plan. Bush proposed to create an option for younger workers to divert up to 4 percent of their wages through the payroll tax to personal accounts, which would be invested in government-approved mutual funds. Critics, among them the AFL-CIO, called this “Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security,” as though the entire Social Security program would somehow move from governmental control to private ownership, which wasn’t at all what Bush was proposing. At a time when massive corporate fraud was being exposed at Enron and other major corporations, and the stock market had taken a huge dive, “privatizing” even part of one’s retirement nest egg was a frightening idea; it implied taking the retirement program out of the hands of the government and turning it over to Wall Street speculators. In 2002, CNN correspondent John King asked the president about “your plan to partially privatize Social Security,” and Bush protested: “We call them personal savings accounts, John.”
Bush, of course, was trying to frame the issue his way; calling the accounts “personal savings” made it sound as though the owners would control their retirement money themselves, as they would a checking account. In fact, the accounts Bush eventually proposed allowed only a handful of investment choices, with little or no choice in how money could be paid out at retirement. Both sides used misleading words in the debate, but Bush’s nomenclature didn’t catch on. When he made a strong push for passage in 2005, opponents kept calling the plan “privatization,” and the idea was quietly dropped for lack of support. The issue had not been framed as Bush wished, as one of potential gain for younger workers. It had been framed as one of potential loss for Social Security beneficiaries generally.
George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California–Berkeley, has argued in a best-selling book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, that conservatives have been far better than liberals at framing issues in this way. He says that President Bush successfully framed the tax debate by talking