Thursday, May 05, 2005

The people's money

I never bought into the Lakoff framing mysticism (he doesn't offer nearly enough empirical data, the whole strict father / nurturant marsupial thing is way overplayed, and he isn't that good at frame development himself), but I'll recognize the value of having useful phrases that efficiently express our points. And I think it'd be good to refer to federal funds as "the people's money." This contains an implicit response to anyone who has the libertarian taxation-is-theft intuition, reminding them that money in the federal kitty is money that is going to be spent on making you better off. And since we're the party of fiscal responsibility nowadays, we can criticize the Republicans for giving away the people's money in big corporate subsidies. It also has a nice proletarian feel, which Edwardsfolk like myself can appreciate.

1 comment:

Neil Sinhababu said...

Well! this is a style of comment that I did not anticipate. The Ho comments on Matt's blog can be found here.