Word choice matters

Bill Keller shoots for what I think is supposed to be an unbiased look at the debate among Democrats, liberals and progressives (and yes, folks, these are three separate entities) over income inequality, mobility and jobs. His column, however, is anything but unbiased and the reason is simple: Word choice.

As I tell my students, word choice matters. There is a difference — subtle as it may be — between having someone “say” something in a news story and having them “claim” the same. Claim, as Websters points out, has a number of meanings, but the relevant one for attribution of comments is this: “to state as a fact or as one’s belief (something that may be called into question).”

So, when we write, “Joe says he was beaten by police,” what we are saying is that Joe said it, without any implication as to its veracity; when we write, “Joe claims he was beaten by police,” we insert a small bit of doubt into the equation. Again, this is incredibly subtle, but accrual of these kinds of tiny distinctions creates a larger impression in a story.

Keller’s column today is far less subtle. From its opening statement — “Inequality is in.” — to the way in which it refers to the left-most edges of the debate, Keller’s column is an attempt to pull the debate over income inequality back toward the corporate centrist position. (Notice my word choice? This is an intentional signpost designed to tell you where I stand on the issue.)

“Inequality is in,” he writes, as if he were writing about the latest in fine fashion. The phrasing carries echoes of the style pages or celebrity coverage, an approach that the serious pundit is supposed to dismiss. Inequality, the phrasing implies, is just the latest opinion du jour; tomorrow, there’ll be something else. And, given the fickle nature of the political classes (note my word choice again), he is probably right. Something else will be coming down the pike really soon.

But Keller has a point to make, though he wants you to think that his column is just an exposition of a debate occurring on the left side of the political world. He doesn’t really have an opinion, though he knows it is something he is supposed to have.

If you traffic in opinions, as a pro or an amateur, you’d better have opinions about inequality. And so I set off into the intramural battlefield to see what’s up.

The left-left sees economic inequality as mainly a problem of distribution — the accumulation of vast wealth that never really trickles down from on high. Their prescription is to tax the 1 percent and close corporate loopholes, using the new revenues to subsidize the needs of the poor and middle class. They would string the safety net higher: expand Social Security, hold Medicare inviolate, extend unemployment insurance, protect food stamps, create more low-income housing. They would raise the minimum wage.

The center-left — and that includes President Obama, most of the time — sees the problem and the solutions as more complicated. Yes, you want to provide greater security for those without independent means (see Obamacare), but you also need to create opportunity, which means, first and foremost, jobs. Yes, you can raise taxes on the rich, but you don’t want to punish success. “You want to increase social mobility by providing an opportunity for the bottom to become rich, not forcing the rich to become poor,” said Acemoglu, who aligns more with the center than with the populists.

Look closely at these two paragraphs. They are straightforward evocations of the debate, right? Not so fast. Look more closely and you start to notice some subtle difference, primarily in the selection of details.

The first, describing the “left-left” — yes, that would include the writer of this post — points to a series of solutions that can be described primarily as “more of the same.” The “left-left,” Keller is saying, just wants higher taxes on the rich so we can continue to provide the same kind of social-safety net we’ve always provided. It is simple, really, he has them saying. (That is only partially true. The “left-left” program is much broader than this and includes a lot more structural alterations.)

Contrast this with the “center-left,” which Keller says “sees the problem and solutions as more complicated.” The “center-left” wants many of the same things that the “left-left” wants, but the “center-left” are grown-ups. They don’t want to “punish success.” And the “center-left” gets a spokesman with authority speaking with a real voice in a direct quotation, which gives what he says a lot more heft than the vague, almost straw-men like lefties who just want to take that Keller has posited. The “center-left,” in the person of MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, knows that the issue is “social mobility,” and “providing an opportunity for the bottom to become rich, not forcing the rich to become poor.”

That seems reasonable, right? Of course, the “left-left” is not asking for the “rich to become poor.” The “left-left” — in this case, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown and not Slavoj Zizek, Howard Zinn or even the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — is asking for a fair distribution of resources, which means taking a little from those who have to help those without avoid abject poverty. But it is convenient to paint those on the “left-left” as being willing to bankrupt the rich (this is on Keller; I haven’t read Acemoglu’s book and I don’t know the context for his quotation). This is called the straw-man fallacy, which is described by the Purdue OWL website as a move that “oversimplifies an opponent’s viewpoint and then attacks that hollow argument.”

In this example, the author attributes the worst possible motive to an opponent’s position. In reality, however, the opposition probably has more complex and sympathetic arguments to support their point. By not addressing those arguments, the author is not treating the opposition with respect or refuting their position.

In the case of Keller’s argument, he has used the Acemoglu’s quotation to turn calls for some basic fairness in the tax code (there I go with the word choice again) into a desire to bankrupt an entire class.

Keller then goes on to describe the “left-left” view of entitlements (all of those programs that we actually pay into with the expectation that we will get something back later, like Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance) as a debate between hardliners — or maybe children — and a reasonable, grown-up group of policy intellectuals.

The left-left, he says “seems to believe” that all of the things it wants can “be had by milking the rich and cutting military spending.” In contrast, he says, “centrists would raise taxes some and cut defense spending some,” but also want to “curb the growth of entitlements,” because “the stampede of baby boomers into Social Security and Medicare will crowd out everything else.” So, the left has not plan aside from tax and spend — which is utter nonsense — while centrists are ready to act like adults. The left, after all, “tends to treat entitlements as sacred” and wants to expand them (this is all he says about the left’s approach), while those reasonable centrists

favor measures to slow the growth of entitlements: using a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) formula that more accurately reflects how people spend, cutting benefits for those who don’t really need them, possibly extending the retirement age a couple of years, and using the government’s leverage to drive down the costs of medical care.

Ultimately, Keller views the larger liberal project — and most of the views along the spectrum — as superior to those being espoused on the right, which he describes as “a discredited gospel of gutting government, cutting taxes and letting the market sort it out.” Of course, much of the centrist pablum (ugh, my word choice again), is just a softer, gentler version of what the right has been pushing for years, whether it is the false promise of a reformed COLA that measures inflation based on our reactions to tighter economic circumstances (buying less meat to stretch the family budget would be factored in) or pushing the retirement age higher (which just delays when people can collect benefits and has no correlation to what is happening in the job market).

But this is not a post on whether the “left-left” or the “center-left” is right in this debate — or no more than Keller’s column in the Times was just an exposition on the debate among lefties, liberals and Democrats about economic inequality. I’m as neutral on this as Keller is.

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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet