News Brief: The Transactional Dog-Whistle Politics of the Term "Taxpayer"

Citations Needed

News, Society & Culture

4.8 • 4.1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2021

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On this News Brief, we discuss the ubiquitous weaponization of the term "taxpayer" in media and politics and how it deliberately smuggles right-wing, transactional and deeply racialized notions of people's relationship with their government into our cultural understanding of taxation, public spending and social services.

Our guest is the Law and Political Economy Project's Raúl Carrillo.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to A Cytations Needed News Brief.
0:06.1	I'm Neem Asherazi.
0:07.3	I'm Adam Johnson.
0:08.3	You can follow the show on Twitter at CytationsPod, Facebook, Cytations Needed and become
0:12.7	a supporter of our work through patreon.com slash Cytations Needed Podcasts with Neem
0:17.0	Asherazi and Adam Johnson.
0:18.2	All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated.
0:21.3	We are 100% listener funded and we do these news briefs in between our regularly scheduled
0:26.9	episodes when there's just something that is on our minds and we really just want to
0:32.5	get it off our chest.
0:33.8	And the thing that we have been seeing maybe not now more than ever because this is a
0:37.8	trope that has been going on for decades, let alone centuries, but the idea of taxpayer
0:45.4	money and the taxpayers burden.
0:50.2	What is being done at the taxpayers expense?
0:54.0	We hear this all the time in our media and also of course political rhetoric and we thought
0:58.8	we would just take the time to unpack it a bit.
1:00.7	Yeah, this is something that's been nodding us for some time.
1:03.1	Since we started this show, we've mentioned it a couple times the idea of taxpayer as a
1:07.4	smarmy watchword for a specific contingent of people.
1:10.9	And I know I've always wanted to try to get around to doing something on this and I'm glad
1:15.2	we finally did it.
1:16.2	I'm excited to discuss the problems with the word taxpayer and the kind of broader problems
	...

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