Inside Obama's Twitter Blitz On the Payroll Tax 294
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.'"
Social Media: Removing Money from Politics (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:But (Score:3, Interesting)
Using the media to hide the impact (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:But (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:But (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:*yawn* (Score:4, Interesting)
The CNN anchor was clearly trying to corner him in to having to say something unpopular as opposed to having a dialog and talking about the issues it would cause. It was politics not news and appeared very clearly biased to me.
I didn't see it - I don't watch any television news. But if I were doing such an interview, that's exactly what I would be pushing for because few if any republicans had word one to say about how to pay for the extension of the Bush tax cuts. At best it was all magic talk about "job creators" ultimately improving the economy.
I don't think its "politics" at all to zero in on what sure looks like a serious case of hypocrisy. I put a lot more weight on increasing consumer demand as a way to create news jobs than I do on incentives for "job creators" so perhaps I'm biased, and there is some means of explaining the apparent hypocrisy that I've missed.
Re:But (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:But (Score:3, Interesting)
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?