The Obama administration's FY2016 budget has already garnered a lot of coverage. However, as one would expect, Republicans have attached themselves to railing against the tax increases that fund some of the really good proposals in there. Naturally, their rhetoric goes unchallenged in the media, that oftentimes only seeks to set up dramatic false equivalencies to the detriment of real analysis.
We cannot allow Republicans to hijack the discussion and just make it about the tax increases in Obama's budget. At every instance, we must be able to counter every mention of a tax increase with multiple examples of what those tax increases are meant to fund.
Things like:
Funding child care, Head Start Programs, and universal preschool.
A tax credit for families where both spouses work.
Paid sick and family leave.
Retirement saving for part-time workers and small business workers.
Free community college and expanded job-training programs.
Investing in American-based manufacturing jobs and businesses.
Repairing and modernizing our transportation infrastructure.
Investing in basic research and development, medical research, and clean energies.
Committing to our veterans through access to health care, jobs, education, and housing.
Modernizing government by attracting engineers and innovators, and providing public data to support private endeavors.
We must make these beneficial, even groundbreaking proposals the forefront of the budget debate.
We must not allow Republican rhetoric of tax hikes and deficit chicken littling to retain dominance over the airwaves. We must force them to share time with the actual ideas Obama is proposing.
Not only does this take advantage of the fact that most of these ideas are also popular ideas, but also takes Republican talking heads out of attack mode and into defense mode. They must not only make a point of whether or not they support these programs (and in so doing, risk alienating their rabid base by actually supporting something that Obama does), but if they do go so far as to say that they support such programs, they must also answer how they would propose funding these things, if not through tax increases and closing loopholes.
Furthermore, for every one of these points that gets brought up, we must also be there to point out how many of the last Republican-proposed budgets left these types of proposals out of the equation. We must remind people that, if the past is any indication, Republicans have no intention of supporting any of these proposals.
All people hear about is the 4 trillion price tag, the kind of mind-busting meme the media is quick to latch onto. We must refocus their attention not to the price tag, but to the goods and services they are receiving.
Too often, political discussions begin, not at some middle ground on which everyone can agree, but based on the warped virtual reality of Republican talking points by default. By allowing them to do this for so long, we have lost many decisive battles, simply because it forces us to begin from behind. If we ever hope to undo some of this damage that has allowed Republicans to dominate the policy debate, we must take a more aggressive approach to simply flat out countering Republican rhetoric wherever it rears its ugly head with effective rhetoric of our own that gets to the heart of the matter.
I know this may have little impact on the actors who should ultimately be the target of this post, the media who enable Republican chicken littles without much fuss, but I am sure there are kossacks here who will face some sort of GOP-style rhetoric jacking on the budget, on their facebook or twitter feeds perhaps. Hopefully, this provides some insight on how to counter those types of attacks, as well.
Boehner and his cohorts have already come out calling some of Obama's proposals dead in Congress. Let's do our best to make sure they feel some political pain for pulling those plans off the table, Republican or not.