So the bigger issue, possibly related to Timex’s point, is what level of truth-bending, straw-manning, and / or tribal signalling is appropriate for politicians to employ in the interest of getting their message out and getting people energized to tackle real problems?
The answer can’t be “none, you must always and in every way tell the whole truth” because no one has time or expertise enough to understand the full details of, say, climate science or the economic impacts of Medicare-for-all or a UBI.
On the flip side, I think the GOP has clearly shown how crazy it would be to have no limit on how much distortion is accepted by voters. Likewise, stuff like GMO scares and anti-vaxxers show how certain brands of conspiracy theory can end up having policy weight even among otherwise-rational liberals. And of course, no one is immune to snake oil like fad diets and homeopathy and so on, so there’s always a chance of similar tactics creeping into your politics.
But those are some pretty extreme boundaries. To give some narrower examples, I think AOC’s tweet about the article where the Pentagon “lost $21 trillion” goes too far on the distortion side, possibly unintentionally (that is, she may have believed the Pentagon actually doesn’t know what it spent that money on, as opposed to the truth, which is that the sum represents the same money going back and forth between different accounts without sufficient oversight). Mainly, I think it goes too far because she implies that there’s some $21 trillion pot of gold that’s been sitting in the DoD for the past 20 years, which we could have used to pay for healthcare. This kind of thing plays into the narrative that you can institute Medicare-for-all and just pay for it with magical savings from somewhere.
Digging a little deeper here, how do you make the policy case for single-payer insurance? Most people would rather have free healthcare than pay insurance premiums and medical bills. If you raise taxes to pay for it, though, people will be angry about the taxes, even if the taxes they pay are less than their previous medical expenses. So somehow you have to give people an informed choice about that, despite opponents who are willing to distort and exaggerate to muddy the waters and convince people the status quo is safer. This is a single policy, but it highlights the broader problem of how to “govern” in the age of fake news.
One way to be totally clear about the tradeoffs would be to give people an accounting of where their tax money is going. Like, rather than just making people put in “I earned X, I paid for Y, I own Z, I owe $$$”, what if the different “worksheet” areas lead to a specific bill targeted at specific services? So you work out, based on your income and various deductions or other personal circumstances, how much you owe the government for healthcare, how much you owe for the military, how much for national parks, welfare, debt service, and so on. I know politicians have no desire to do this, since it makes the costs really salient to people, but it might also encourage some more deliberate thought about creative ways to finance important stuff. I’m sure there would also be tons of wrangling about how to break down the costs and the whole thing would lead to people going nuts about not wanting to pay for anything they don’t specifically benefit from.
Another way to do it would be to stop treating taxes like money the government is taking from you for working hard, and instead treat it like money your employer or revenue source is obligated to pay. So everything that pays you sets aside some amount for taxes. If you get income from a side gig, you charge people a % tax on top of your rate, and the bank or credit card software automatically forwards it to the government; when your employer tells you your salary, it is your take-home salary and they pay the taxes to the gov’t. At the end of the year, you get to update your tax situation if anything has changed, and that adjusts the rates for these various charges; otherwise, the IRS just sends you an accounting that tells you what your rates are for the following year. That way, everyone can stop worrying about the damn federal budget and just let it be whatever makes the most sense to get stuff done, perhaps running more new debt when it’s cheap, tightening the belt a bit when debt is expensive, getting people to buy bonds for specific policies, or whatever else needs to happen. People don’t notice much when the employer pays a lot more for healthcare, because the extra cost is tax deductible and not reported as part of their top-line salary.
