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Language in Politics: How Bureaucrats Use Poorly Defined Terms to Expand Government Power - YouTube
Channel: Capital Research Center
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When you hear the terms âUnemployment Rate,â
âPoverty,â and âRace,â it sounds like
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youâre hearing a straightforward concept
you can base a discussion on.
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But what you donât know is: these terms
donât actually mean what you think they do.
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Government and media have slyly worked together
to frame American political discourse by using
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language in a way aimed at convincing you
to get on their side about controversial issues,
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rather than actually communicating facts.
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Does it sound unbelievable that the American
public could be mislead so easily?
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Letâs look at some concrete examples.
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Thereâs the unemployment rate.
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics uses two surveys,
one of households, the other of businesses,
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to determine the unemployment rate.
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Just determine the number of potential job-holders,
and the number of actual job-holders, do a
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little math, and youâve got the unemployment
rate⊠right?
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Not exactly.
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Do you count inmates in jails and prisons?
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How about people who do temp work, or those
who work 10 hours a week, or those on furlough?
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Do you count people who are only passively
looking for work?
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How about people who have completely given
up looking for work?
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The answers to those questions determine the
unemployment rate⊠or, I should say, the
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unemployment rates.
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The government actually has six.
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Right now, the unemployment rate thatâs
usually reported to the public looks pretty
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good, 4.9% as of this recording.
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But when you calculate in the people whoâve
quit looking for work, itâs pretty bad.
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So when you hear people say that the unemployment
rate is rigged⊠well, itâs complicated,
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but they do have a point.
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The poverty rate?
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Thatâs even worse, because the poverty rate
is largely arbitrary.
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By setting the criteria â the definition
of poverty â bureaucrats can make the poverty
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rate as high or as low as they want and can
get away with.
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Iâm not saying thereâs no such thing as
poverty.
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Poverty exists.
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But beauty and ugliness exist, too.
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Imagine if someone reported that, this month,
the number of beautiful people in the U.S.
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increased from 10.1 percent to 10.2 percent
â a difference of one person in a thousand
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â youâd say thatâs nuts.
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No one can make such a determination, especially
down to one person in a thousand.
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Yet thatâs the sort of thing the government
does with the poverty rate.
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Poverty exists.
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It just canât be scientifically measured.
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So the government produces numbers that are
a combination of sociology and baloney, and
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those numbers are used to determine the amount
of spending on government program after government
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program.
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Over decades, bureaucrats have actually raised
the poverty line, typically by about one percent
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a year, after adjusting for inflation.
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Thus, people youâve never heard of, who
were never elected by anyone and arenât
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accountable to anyone, get to decide whoâs
eligible for government programs based on
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income, and who gets government subsidies
and how much those subsidies are â on Obamacare,
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for example â and they make a lot of other
decisions that were supposed to be done through
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the democratic process.
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And thereâs the big one: race.
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A total scam.
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Racial categories were created to oppress
people, and thatâs how theyâre used today.
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They have no basis in science â no basis
in cultural anthropology, or physical anthropology,
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or genetics.
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Even the American Anthropological Association,
which was largely founded to promote racism,
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admits now thatâs itâs nonsense.
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Yet our government, and our academic institutions,
and our politicians, are obsessed with putting
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people into categories that make no sense.
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You can say thereâs one race, or many thousands
of ethnicities and subcultures, but if you
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try to put people in a small number of categories
â say, âwhiteâ and âblackâ and âLatinoâ
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and âother,â or âwhiteâ and âpeople
of color,â or any similar scheme â well,
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youâre just makinâ it up.
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People from Syria and Lebanon used to be classified
as âwhite,â people from Ireland were called
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black, Jews from Europe were considered a
mentally deficient race, according to the
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so-called science of the day.
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And the âLatinoâ group combining people
whose ancestors came from Mexico, Brazil,
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El Salvador, Cuba, the U.S. commonwealth of
Puerto Rico, and many other places â people
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who have very little in common with each other?
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That seemingly ancient category was actually
concocted by the Census Bureau when I was
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in college.
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âCarcinogen,â ârenewable energy,â
âinflationâ, and âassault weaponsâ
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are all much more complex than they seem as
well.
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Next time you hear one of these terms, or
any other suspicious concept, listen carefully
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and make sure youâre actually having the
conversation you think you are.
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If weâre going to move forward as a nation,
we need to concern ourselves with facts, not
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words that are, at their heart, meaningless.
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Itâs not the âunemployment rateâ thatâs
important, itâs the number of people who
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donât have jobs but want them.
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Itâs not âracismâ thatâs important,
itâs bigotry towards any group based on
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meaningless physical characteristics.
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If we can think objectively, we can start
to fix the problems plaguing our world, but
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in the hands of the Washington bureaucracy,
ill-defined terms become things of wax to
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shape as they please.
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