The Word ‘Taxpayer’ Tilts In Favor of Conservatives and Should Be Eliminated

New Republic Writer: The Word ‘Taxpayer’ Tilts In Favor of Conservatives and Should Be Eliminated
You don’t have to be Frank Luntz or George Lakoff to know that linguistic framing matters a great deal in politics. 
Sometimes, however, nuance is in the eye of the beholder. 
The New Republic’s Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, for example, considers “taxpayer” an ideologically weighted term.

In a Thursday article pegged to the just-released House Republican budget for fiscal 2016, Bruenig claimed that the use of “taxpayers” (rather than “people”) when discussing fiscal and economic issues benefits conservatives for reasons including that it “seems to subtly promote the idea that a person’s share in our democratic governance should depend upon their contribution in taxes” and bolsters the makers-vs.-takers argument that became associated with the GOP during the 2012 campaign.

From Bruenig’s piece (bolding added):

In the 43-page budget, the word “taxpayer” and its permutations appear 24 times, as often as the word “people.” It’s worthwhile to compare these usages, because the terms are, in a sense, rival ideas. While “people” designates the broadest possible public as the subject of a political project, “taxpayer” advances a considerably narrower vision—and that's why we should eliminate it from political rhetoric and punditry.

…[A]s the Republican authors of this budget know well, the beneficiaries of welfare programs tend to receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes, because they are in most cases low-income. The “taxpayers” this passage has in mind, therefore, don’t seem to be the recipients of these welfare programs, but rather those who imagine that they personally fund them. By this logic, the public is divided neatly into makers and takers, to borrow the parlance of last election’s Republicans…