Dr. Word observes: “Job-killing” is Republicans’ all purpose adjective

by David Safier

Dr. Word would like to try an experiment to see how well this works.

Job-killing cuts to universities.

The job-killing Rosemont mine.

Arizona's job-killing tax breaks to corporations.

It appears to work quite well. Put "job-killing" in front of anything one doesn't like, and it immediately makes that activity seem sinister, especially at an economic moment when everyone says creating "jobs, jobs, jobs" is the number one priority.

On one page of today's Star, John Boehner uses  the adjective in two separate stories.

In the story about the CBO estimate that repealing Health Care legislation would raise federal deficits by $230 billion over the next 10 years, Boehner calls the legislation "the job-killing health-care law."

In the story about the Republican push to cut spending as a requirement for raising the debt ceiling, Boehner refers to "the job-killing spending binge in Washington."

Without requiring the speaker to prove a cause-effect relationship between a government action and job loss, a simple hyphenated adjective, repeated over and over, does the trick. And it passes the Republican effectiveness test: it's short, punchy and fits easily into a news-and-television-friendly sentence.

On googling "job-killing," Dr. Word discovered he is not alone in making this observation. Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein wrote a column Thursday, 'Job-killing' regulation? 'Job-killing' spending? Let's kill this GOP canard.

There's "job-killing legislation," in particular the health-care reform law. And "job-killing regulations," especially anything coming out of the EPA and the IRS. Big deficits are always "job-killing," which might come as something of a surprise to all you Keynesians out there, along with the "job-killing spending binge" and even "job-killing stimulus projects."

President Obama, we are told repeatedly, runs a "job-killing administration" with a "job-killing agenda" carried out by, you guessed it, a "job-killing bureaucracy."

In the fevered Republican imagination, the entire federal government is a "job-killing machine" or – my personal favorite – a "job-killing beast."

An appropriate term for Boehner and his fellow message spinners may be "thought-killing Republicans."