GOP senator boasted about her family's self-reliance received $460K in federal subsidies

[GilbertWham]

When they start a-feudin’?

[onemanmob]

For some reason you seem to think everyone else is reading the title of the article wrong… Have you considered maybe you are reading it incorrectly?

The title reads “GOP senator who boasted about her family’s self-reliance received $460K in federal subsidies”

I may be jumping to conclusions, but the following text in the title would still be in the context of her family receiving the aid, no?

And before anyone else can post it:

[bwv812]

@anon61221983

Because it’s wrong of him to have a political view, because reasons.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. The senator didn’t receive $460k in federal subsidies, but Cory’s headline says she did. The linked article managed to make the point that she is being hypocritical without engaging in falsity, and their message is probably stronger because of it.

[bwv812]

@onemanmob

For some reason you seem to think everyone else is reading the title of the article wrong… Have you considered maybe you are reading it incorrectly?

The title reads “GOP senator who boasted about her family’s self-reliance received $460K in federal subsidies”

I may be jumping to conclusions, but the following text in the title would still be in the context of her family receiving the aid, no?

I don’t think everyone is reading it incorrectly. Many aren’t. You are.

You talk about this “context of her family receiving the aid.” Where is this context established? Certainly not in the headline.

How about this fictitious headline: “GOP senator who boasted about her family’s pro-choice stance had multiple abortions.” Does this mean that they senator’s family had multiple abortions or that the senator had multiple abortions?

Relative Clauses - English Grammar

[anon67050589]

It sounds like your argument is that Cory doesn’t have a perfect grasp of English syntax, rather than that he was purposely obfuscating for clicks.

[onemanmob]

Fair enough. It is entirely possible I did jump to the correct conclusion, mainly because anyone claiming to be “self reliant” is full of so much bullshit it starts leaking out of their mouths.

[Skeptic]

@anon67050589

It sounds like your argument is that Cory doesn’t have a perfect grasp of English syntax, rather than that he was purposely obfuscating for clicks.

Neither writing nor parsing the headline correctly require a perfect grasp of grammar, only ordinary high school level grammar - saying “perfect” is a straw argument, an attempt to falsely imply unreasonable expectations.

Corey is a professional writer. I do not believe for a second that he does not understand what a clause is. Nor do I believe for a second that he has less than a high school level understanding of grammar.

[andy_hilmer]

@anon61221983

Well, clearly if they can prove that Corey is being disingenuous, the entire house of cards that she’s being hypocritical comes falling down, right? That’s how it works, right? Because it’s wrong of him to have a political view, because reasons.

In This Thread: stupid people and trollies find an excuse to attack the site and derail using dumb interpretations and dead issues. We can’t do anything about it except to note the stupidity and link to wiktionary.org. I guess it’s a portion of the week ending with “-day”.

[Skeptic]

@andy_hilmer

In This Thread: stupid people and trollies find an excuse to attack the site and derail using dumb interpretations and dead issues. We can’t do anything about it except to note the stupidity and link to wiktionary.org. I guess it’s a portion of the week ending with “-day”.

Right, because because only “stupid people” would ever notice Corey’s trend of factually misleading headlines.

/s

The reason you can’t do anything about this is because corey continues to do it. He’s the only person who can actually change this problem, by writing titles that are factually accurate.

Corey’s post was about the hypocrisy and misrepresentation that Joni Ernst engaged in her speech about her family’s self-reliance. It’s best not to use misrepresentation ones self when castigating others for it, which is why Corey’s counterfactual title in this post is perhaps more galling than usual.

[bryan]

To say nothing of the socks.

[andy_hilmer]

Let’s try this again: your semantic arguments rely on narrow interpretations of words which are simply wrong. Knock it off or be less thin skinned about being called out on it.

[Skeptic]

@andy_hilmer

Let’s try this again: your semantic arguments rely on narrow interpretations of words which are simply wrong. Knock it off or be less thin skinned about being called out on it.

Let’s start with some facts rather than your attempts at condescension and conclusory arguments. Here’s the post headline:

GOP senator who boasted about her family’s self-reliance received $460K in federal subsidies

There is really no way to legitimatly parse that sentence to mean anything other than the senator personally received $460K in federal subsidies, which she did not, her family did.

I’ll make this clear with comas:

GOP senator, who boasted about her family’s self-reliance, received $460K in federal subsidies

Or, with the clause removed:

GOP senator received $460K in federal subsidies

Your reflexive defense of Cory’s title and your attempt to shout down legitimate criticism are not based on facts.

[jlw]

I congratulate you both for finding a way to have this conversation without the personal attacks.

[Skeptic]

I was hoping for the coveted jlw Pedant Badge, instead. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[jlw]

We are waiting for our true pedantic hero to emerge. One who can correct us all.

[wynn_james]

Explain to me exactly why it’s a good idea for us to pay $100-200k per year to make sure one family’s business stays running to lose more money year after year?

That’s the argument against the entire welfare state.
And, yeah, the argument was probably originally that the poor simple farmer j,ust needs a little help and now the program is an out of control money pit that can’t be killed off, that subsidizes a method of living or doing business as people did when the program started.

[SteampunkBanana]

I’m not sure that’s exactly correct…

[anon50609448]

@micah

But it’s not the “gotcha” the headline would have you believe (or that I wish were true, as I think she’s a complete nutcase–I even donated to her opponent’s campaign). IMO it’s very similar to the so-called “hypocrisy” of Warren Buffett calling for more steeply progressive taxation while he continues to take every tax deduction available to him today.

Well, but it is a gotcha headline. No one is really self-made or self-reliant (maybe they discovered fire for themselves as a toddler, I don’t know) and people who say they are responsible for their own success without acknowledging how much they relied on and inherited from society are tiresome. If you took $0 in subsidies then you are not “self-made.” But when you took $460,000 in subsidies you really, really aren’t self-made.

We can talk about how it doesn’t come out to much money, as you say, $2500 a year in corn subsidies for her father, but there are a lot of people in America who could desperately use $2500 a year to put food on the table, and those are the people who she is going after when she talks about being self-reliant. “Self-reliant” as in didn’t have food stamps or after school programs or breakfast programs at schools. The point of that rhetoric is to justify taking food out of the mouths of kids who could at least be getting something in their bellies for $2500 a year.

Maybe for her family the $2500 wasn’t make-or-break, maybe it wasn’t what bought her clothes or her food when she was a kid (I know the subsidy referenced came after she was an adult - if she wanted to draw the distinction and call out her father for having turned into a mooch she could have done so, I won’t do it for her) but that’s all the more reason it’s an awful thing to say. How much more awful to ignore being provided with luxuries at the expense of other people’s necessities.

@some_guy

If the GOP cut all Federal subsidies I’d applaud them, but mainly because it means they would massively lose the next several election cycles.

I think by “lose the next several election cycles” you mean, “cease to exist.”

@JonathanR

This one is particularly egregious because it blames someone (Ernst) for something done by other people (mostly her brother).

It isn’t when she talks about her family’s self reliance, which she does. If she talked about her own self-reliance and said, “Now, my brother, on the other hand, is a leech.” then we could evaluate it differently. It’s pretty convenient to take credit for your family’s virtues and have other people distance you from their actions on your behalf

@Skeptic

There is really no way to legitimatly parse that sentence to mean anything other than the senator personally received $460K in federal subsidies, which she did not, her family did.

There really is. Did you know that often in language a lot of information is implied? Did you know that headlines do this much moreso than ordinary language because they try to convey a lot of information in a limited space?

The headline says she boasted about her family’s self-reliance, it is pretty obvious from the word “boasted” that the part coming after that is going to be a contradiction of her claim of her family’s self-reliance. I can totally see how someone could read that headline and think that it was saying she received $460,000 in benefits herself, but there really is another way to read it.

[katkins]

@kuangmk11

Just to play devils advocate: that is not very much money over that amount of time for a farm.

Just to play devil’s devils advocate… we wouldn’t care if it weren’t for the fact that she’s a conservative politician arguing for a platform of “less taxes, less government, fewer government handouts, more self-reliance”…

[micah]

@simonize

I suspect that only the wealthy have assets worth enough for this to make economic sense… Although I’ll bet that somewhere, somebody is deducting interest for the capital expense of all those cars that are leased…Certainly most busines/private jets are owned by corporations or leased rather than owned fee total by individuals so that interest and maintenance are deducted from taxes somewhere as expenses…

To deduct business expenses you have to have business income. So a wealthy person can’t simply buy a car or house using a shell corporation and deduct the expense from her taxes, unless that shell corporation has other income to offset (at which point it’s not really a “shell” any more). And the IRS is very clear that personal use of a vehicle or home is not a business expense, so even if you have your own business, taking your home’s mortgage principal payments or your ferrari as a business deduction is cheating on your taxes just like lying about your income or any number of other things. If you actually use your personal vehicle for your business or operate your business out of your home, there are strict rules for how much of your car/home expenses you can deduct as business expenses.

When wealthy people buy homes using shell corporations, it’s usually because they want privacy (they’d rather 321 Park Ave LLC show in public records as the buyer than their own name), not a tax benefit.

Private jets are like a hybrid of a car (you can’t deduct personal use) and a home (rich people often use shell corporations for privacy). There have been a number of high profile tax cases where people have been accused of inappropriately deducting personal use of a private jet as a business expense.