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Inside Obama's Twitter Blitz On the Payroll Tax
Hugh Pickens writes "Brandon Rittiman reports that White House officials launched a Twitter campaign Tuesday to put pressure on Congress to reach a deal extending the payroll-tax cut. Using the Twitter hashtag #40dollars, the White House successfully got thousands of people to respond and explain what a $40 cut to each paycheck would mean to them personally. By Wednesday morning, the #40dollars hashtag started 'trending,' which is what happens when Twitter's algorithms see a topic suddenly surge. It's not easy to create that kind of surge, but the White House has 2.5 million Twitter followers to call upon. Macon Phillips, the President's Director of Digital Strategy, says his team has managed to get a few Twitter topics to rise to the level of 'trending' before — most notably when they began tweeting about the death of Osama bin Laden. 'What's very important about a social-media campaign like this is that regular people are making the point about how this would affect them. It's not us here in Washington trying to argue on their behalf.' says Phillips. 'The #40dollars campaign puts a face on that amount to demonstrate the payroll tax cut's real-world impact on middle-class families.'"
The disagreement was never over the payroll tax holiday. The disagreement was over how to pay for it. The President's initial proposal was to pay for it with the millionaire's surtax, which he knew that Republicans opposed before he proposed it.
For Democrats who are pretending to not understand, this would be the equivalent of the Republicans proposing to pay for it by slashing Obama Care, and then accusing the President of being against the payroll tax holiday when he came out against the legislation.
For some reason, the media has used this as a huge opportunity to bash Republicans. Want to know why Republicans don't want to extend the tax holiday for two months? They don't want to go through the same media circus again in two months.
The bias of our media is pathetic. The stupidity of our population is tragic. The fate of our people is obvious. Next year we elect the last President of the United States. We face serious problems in the next five years, and the media has successfully kept anyone remotely competent out of the race.
This is going to be hilarious.
Well that depends: who are the tax cuts for? If they are for the poor, then of course it is evil. If they are for the rich, then it will spur job growth and our economy -- at least, this is what FOX would like us to believe...
Isn't thei tax the source of funding for SSI?
It looks like saying "I'm cutting the payroll tax" == "I'm bankrupting SSI faster than ever!"
SSI is in the red, this will not help, it will hurt 'real-world' 'middle-class families'.
This goes well past obfuscation and looks like intentional dishonesty to me.
This will hurt everyone.
No brain, no pain.
Isn't the White House saying $40 / paycheck or did I miss something? For those of us who have real jobs, we get paid once every 2 weeks. Hence, $40 / paycheck is just over $1000 / year.
Quote from Obama
"[On] Tuesday, we asked folks to tell us what would it be like to lose $40 out of your paycheck every week. "
Source: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/12/22/president-obama-discusses-what-40-means-americans-families
A more important deception is that it is a reduction in the amount taxpayers pay into Social Security--NOT the general budget. This is more akin to reducing the amount of 401k withholdings than a tax break because you will have to make it up later one way or another--either through reduced SS benefits or increased SS taxes to make up for the deficit.
should be the next tag the white house pushes. The US cannot afford spending $650 billion on a military we don't need.
I hate to say it, because it's horribly unpopular from a political perspective, but this payroll tax "holiday" is just disastrous policy. Depending on what numbers and what year you're looking at, anywhere from 81 to 89 percent of the entire U.S. budget goes to two things: defense and entitlements. And of those entitlements, the biggest long-term liabilities and problems that we have are Social Security and Medicare.
When you hear these Presidential candidates talk about how they would fix the budget deficits by getting rid of things like the EPA, the IRS, the Departments of Commerce / Energy / Education, etc., then you know should know that they are not making any sort of good-faith effort at solving the problem, and that they cannot be taken seriously. The dirty little secret is that you could cut out 100% of the discretionary non-defense spending (i.e., everything except for the military and entitlements) and you would have barely made a dent in the problem as a whole.
The whole purpose of the payroll/FICA tax is to provide funds for Social Security and Medicate. Again, these are the two biggest problems that the U.S. has from a budget perspective -- biggest by leaps and bounds. So not only does this policy make the deficit problem worse, it makes it worse in the worst possible way. Politicians can claim that these tax cuts are "paid for", but everybody knows that these types of Washington claims are usually just shell games for political purposes.
For what it's worth, I like the fact that the payroll tax holiday disproportionally benefits those towards the lower end of the income scale. But there has to be a better way to do this, especially at this critical time in history when the Boomers are retiring and we're going to need these trust funds more than at any time in our history.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
As a fairly regular FOX radio news listener (know thy enemy and all that rot) I can assure you that this IS the tripe they spit out on a daily basis ... which is what the parent post stated, not REP vs DEM's.
If nothing else its the more vocal nutters from the TP that are harping every single day that things like extending unemployment during a very high period of unemployment is a terrible thing to do as it encourages dependence, but giving tax breaks to people / companies that already exploit every single loophole in loopholes is a 100% sure fire way to grow the economy.
I am personally somewhere in the middle, yes people do not need to be accustom to a handout, but giving megacorp a break is just going to help Brazil, India and China cause at the end of the day their only goal is to squeeze every single ounce of profit that they possibly can by any means necessary.
Especially when it's being used by politicians to manipulate people who don't actually have a broader understandimg of the issues at hand. Yep, great to see.
Most people get paid every two weeks, which is the basis used to come up with the $40. Not weekly.
Also the House got beat up justifiably. The one year extension they passed included stuff like unemployment insurance duration cuts.
No Democrat has ever claimed that all tax cuts are evil. That's just a flagrant lie. By contrast, the Republicans do claim that taxes are always bad and should only ever go down. So why are they set against this one?
Answer: They're not. They're just taking hostages, again. Just as when they secured the extension of the Bush tax cuts on the rich by threatening to cut off unemployment benefits around this time last year. Or when they forced cuts to discretionary spending by threatening to force the country into default. This time they're trying to secure a new oil pipeline, and probably other concessions, by threatening to raise taxes on the middle class.
They intentionally added tons of unrelated, partisan crap to the one year bill. Essentially, they were taking the American people hostage. Obama and the Senate refused to play that game, and so came up with a two month extension to buy time in the hopes that the Republicans will stop taking hostages.
It's a vain hope, and we'll be right back where we started in two months -- the Republicans with a gun to the head of the American people, demanding that we give them the world. Same as they did with the unemployment benefits last year, and the debt ceiling some months ago. So don't you dare try to pretend that the Republicans were behaving ethically in proposing that "one year extension". To do so makes you either ignorant or a liar.
Well, Mr. Ingenuous, the pipeline thing would require an up-or-down ruling on the Keystone Pipeline. (Obama's EPA is holding it up because it makes environmentalists mad despite being a good idea.) The Republican bill doesn't even require them to approve it. Calling that provision a subsidy (e.g., the owners of the pipeline getting some kind of monetary payment from the government) isn't ingenuous at all.
The Republicans (and apparently the President) wanted the tax holiday extended all year. The Democrats talked them down to two months.
You should really pay more attention. The Democrats presented a plan to extend the payroll cut for a year and keep medicare payouts at the same level. The Republicans presented a plan to extend the payroll cut for a year while at the same time guaranteeing the oil companies can build a pipeline from Alaska to the Gulf through protected wildlife refuges. Both groups compromised on extending it for two months (with some republicans trying to stall it) in order that they might argue more about which additional things should be added. Mostly, the Democrats have been trying to pass the cuts while the Republicans are refusing until they get the oil company benefits they promised lobbyists.
Claims that it is the Democrats that are preventing the passage of these tax cuts on a longer time frame is either disingenuous or reflects a twisted perception of reality. Stop watching Fox "News".
In case it really has to be said yet again: the poor often have no federal income tax liability, but if they are working poor, they still have to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, which are deducted from one's paycheck, which is why they're called payroll taxes. These taxes are deducible from gross income, but you don't get the taxes themselves back on April 15th. And it was these taxes that the current tax cut is about.
Almost all economists agree that getting money to poorer people helps stimulate the economy the best. The reason is that rich people will just save the money and it will not do much stimulating. Poorer people will buy products that they need and it will stimulate the economy. 70% of our GDP comes from consumer spending. If people buy more products, then companies will hire more people to make more products. Hence, unemployment decreases.
Your response makes no sense. I am talking about return on tax dollars invested. I agree with you that poor people don't save much while rich people do. I save quite a bit. It is a good thing to do if you can afford to do it. But, if you are giving a tax cut of $1bn (for example), then it is more effective to give it to the poor and lower middle class than it is to give it to the rich because the rich will save more of it while the poor cannot afford to save it. So, a tax cut to the poor of $1bn would most likely increase consumer spending by almost $1bn (because they cannot afford not to spend it) while a tax cut of $1bn to the rich would increase consumer spending by a much lower amount (because they can afford to save a lot of it). And since the biggest reason for high unemployment right now is low demand for products, anything you do to increase consumer spending (ie consumers buying products) will help employment because companies will have to hire more people to make more products.
I never said its morally inferior to helping America, but America really should be helping Americans first. As an American who is scraping up pennies to pay rent and having to make long term budgets in order to buy toilet paper why should I feel guilty that I would rather see my tax dollars helping me out over helping a billionaire exploit labor in China just so they can bring their junk back to America and fuck me over with a 1000x price increase?