The Headlines:
“Almost 6 in 10 support Biden's American Families Plan: poll” by Dominick Mastrangelo/ The Hill. May 5, 2021
“Biden’s $1.8 Trillion American Families Plan Is Supported by Nearly 60% of Voters” by Claire Williams/Morning Consult. May 5, 2021
Relevant Poll Questions and Responses:
Take-Away:
Per Merriam-Webster Dictionary, to support is to favor actively. However, the qualifier “somewhat” is a hedge, reflecting mixed feelings or reservations. To “somewhat support” means to partly support - it definitely does not mean wholehearted endorsement. The above headlines mislead because they imply that most poll respondents wholeheartedly endorsed the American Families Plan. They did not - and how could they? Only 23% of survey respondents indicated they have seen, read, or heard “a lot” about the Plan, of which some unknown subset supported it (with or without reservations).
Besides, what does it even mean to have seen, read or heard a lot about a policy - that one listened to talking points from its backers? Or read the Whitehouse Fact Sheet? Sorry, not good enough: without knowing what critics have to say about a policy proposal, one doesn’t know enough to have an informed opinion.
In that spirit, I’ll close with an excerpt from “President Biden's American Families Plan: Budgetary and Macroeconomic Effects”, which projects that:
“…the American Families Plan (AFP) would spend $2.5 trillion, about $700 billion more than the White House’s estimate, over the 10-year budget window, 2022-2031. We estimate that AFP would raise 1.3 trillion in new tax revenue over the same period. By 2050, the AFP would increase government debt by almost 5 percent and decrease GDP by 0.4 percent.”
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References:
Mauranen, A. (2004) “They’re a little bit different”. Observations on hedges in academic talk In Aijmer, K. and Stenström, A-B. (eds) Discourse Patterns in Spoken and Written Corpora. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 173-198.
“President Biden's American Families Plan: Budgetary and Macroeconomic Effects” Penn-Wharton Budget Model/University of Pennsylvania. May 5, 2021