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Remembering why I don’t read the Atlantic
Jul. 28th, 2021 03:22 pmhttps://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/07/how-government-learned-waste-your-time-tax/619568/
I blogged recently about the overly long article about the Seed Thing. Because I actually got a usable nugget out of that exercise (I could tell everyone hey, look, Amazon was right and the person who wrote that article at The Atlantic learned that being skeptical of Amazon was a bad idea. Oh, wait, no, the person who wrote that article did not learn that, but they did learn they were wrong about thinking Amazon was wrong in this one particular instance. Baby steps), I foolishly read another one.
This one, also, was too long. But you know? There’s a nugget in this thing. I’m picking up a lot of nuggets lately. Like, on Saturday, I learned that during the 2016 election, the chatter about Syria and similar was escalating, and the consensus on the ground in the military that if Clinton was elected, she’s be “W. in a pantsuit” and get us into a bunch of wars. The people who believed this were all basically too young to remember the Bill Clinton years, which goes a long ways to explaining why they could fall for such an absolutely ludicrous assertion. Anyway, back to the Atlantic.
“The United States government—whether controlled by Democrats, with their love of too-complicated-by-half, means-tested policy solutions; or Republicans, with their love of paperwork-as-punishment; or both, with their collective neglect of the implementation and maintenance of government programs—has not just given up on making benefits easy to understand and easy to receive. It has in many cases purposefully made the system difficult, shifting the burden of public administration onto individuals and discouraging millions of Americans from seeking aid.”
So, wow. Where to start? YES paperwork to access government programs sucks. That is true! And definitely it is the case that Republicans do that on purpose to minimize use of the programs. It’s like how they do everything: a day late, a dollar short, and so much trouble you wish you’d never bothered with them at all. But Democrats loving means testing? What? That’s what old school Republicans used to like, and Democrats used to do in order to get some Republicans to play along. That’s not what Democrats want. That’s _never_ been what Democrats want.
She says it twice — she clearly believes it.
“For Democrats, it comes from a confidence in means-testing as the best solution to inequality and a fear of ever, ever giving anyone a benefit they might not really need; for Republicans, its foundation is a skepticism that government help really helps people and a knack for using rules and regulations to accomplish what might be hard to accomplish through legislation, such as the winnowing of the Affordable Care Act.”
The messaging problem is real. And this kind of bothesidesism just never seems to die at publications like The Atlantic and the NYT.
(I actually read an article from the NYT — I read it syndicated at another outlet — about whether or not people have “really” summited a bunch of really tall mountains. I understand it is summer, and the adults are taking much needed vacations, but that particular piece was really plumbing the depths.)
I blogged recently about the overly long article about the Seed Thing. Because I actually got a usable nugget out of that exercise (I could tell everyone hey, look, Amazon was right and the person who wrote that article at The Atlantic learned that being skeptical of Amazon was a bad idea. Oh, wait, no, the person who wrote that article did not learn that, but they did learn they were wrong about thinking Amazon was wrong in this one particular instance. Baby steps), I foolishly read another one.
This one, also, was too long. But you know? There’s a nugget in this thing. I’m picking up a lot of nuggets lately. Like, on Saturday, I learned that during the 2016 election, the chatter about Syria and similar was escalating, and the consensus on the ground in the military that if Clinton was elected, she’s be “W. in a pantsuit” and get us into a bunch of wars. The people who believed this were all basically too young to remember the Bill Clinton years, which goes a long ways to explaining why they could fall for such an absolutely ludicrous assertion. Anyway, back to the Atlantic.
“The United States government—whether controlled by Democrats, with their love of too-complicated-by-half, means-tested policy solutions; or Republicans, with their love of paperwork-as-punishment; or both, with their collective neglect of the implementation and maintenance of government programs—has not just given up on making benefits easy to understand and easy to receive. It has in many cases purposefully made the system difficult, shifting the burden of public administration onto individuals and discouraging millions of Americans from seeking aid.”
So, wow. Where to start? YES paperwork to access government programs sucks. That is true! And definitely it is the case that Republicans do that on purpose to minimize use of the programs. It’s like how they do everything: a day late, a dollar short, and so much trouble you wish you’d never bothered with them at all. But Democrats loving means testing? What? That’s what old school Republicans used to like, and Democrats used to do in order to get some Republicans to play along. That’s not what Democrats want. That’s _never_ been what Democrats want.
She says it twice — she clearly believes it.
“For Democrats, it comes from a confidence in means-testing as the best solution to inequality and a fear of ever, ever giving anyone a benefit they might not really need; for Republicans, its foundation is a skepticism that government help really helps people and a knack for using rules and regulations to accomplish what might be hard to accomplish through legislation, such as the winnowing of the Affordable Care Act.”
The messaging problem is real. And this kind of bothesidesism just never seems to die at publications like The Atlantic and the NYT.
(I actually read an article from the NYT — I read it syndicated at another outlet — about whether or not people have “really” summited a bunch of really tall mountains. I understand it is summer, and the adults are taking much needed vacations, but that particular piece was really plumbing the depths.)