Journalists & Advocates: Please Don't Say "Raid JumpStart"

It's Meaningless To Most People

Describe What Gets Defunded Instead

For quite some time, I’ve noticed that a lot of journalists and online commentators write or talk about attempts to “raid JumpStart” to cover the city’s general-fund deficit as if this phrase might mean something to most readers. 

This tendency has ramped up again as budget season arrives and the conservative City Council majority licks its chops over a chance to take a budget that is already smaller as a share of GDP than in 2012, and cut it down a bunch more.

But references to “Raiding JumpStart” are a mistake, both for reporters who have a duty to inform the public, and for advocates, who need the public to understand the stakes.

For Reporters

idioma non grata

(Reporters - This is not a criticism of particular article. This is a broadly socially created pattern I’ve been meaning to address for months).

“Raiding JumpStart” is a phrase that does not meaningfully capture the public policy dimensions of a decision to take money away from affordable housing or small businesses. 

Moving money from one technically discretionary pool into another discretionary pool has nothing to do with the core of what is contested in budget season.

This linguistic shortcut probably started because the topic of JumpStart as a tax and what it initially funded were once major news topics.

Yes, JumpStart was a controversial and groundbreaking plan to finally implement a small but meaningful progressive tax in one of the most regressively taxed jurisdictions in the country. Yes, it was contested both politically, and then judicially, by the Chamber and yes, they lost. Yes, they also claimed the tax would cause businesses to flee and that this would undermine its ability to raise money, and no, that didn’t happen. In fact, JumpStart actually brings in way, way more money than expected.

And yes, progressives in 2020 had specific intentions for where that money would go, and so it technically works sorta-different than the general fund. But not really, because it is actually still totally up to the council. 

These things are true.

But that doesn’t make statements about “raiding JumpStart” meaningful or informative to the public during budget season because totally legal accounting maneuvers aren’t really news and certainly not the primary political issue at hand when a Democracy wrestles through something as fundamental as its budget. 

The movement of money across accounts is clearly not the controversy. Budget season is primarily about where the money goes–what gets funded, what doesn’t, how much–not how all this relates to the legislative intent of nine people in 2020. And I’ll note that when I was a candidate and knocking thousands of doors, very people few even knew what JumpStart was.

In other words, “raiding JumpStart” doesn’t tell anyone anything very meaningful, or maybe any thing at all.

Inadvertent Misdirection

But the biggest risk is misdirection. If a journalist takes on a topic that is enormously consequential to the community–such as whether or not or not affordable housing gets  funded–and papers over it with bland accounting language, the journalist could inadvertently misdirect the public away from what is actually at stake—the funding of programs, not the provenance of accounting categories.  

It is true that in the event that the council or Mayor cuts funding for small businesses, green new deal investments, affordable housing, or investments in health clinics for marginalized communities– any of those could technically be classified as “raiding JumpStart.”

But, my dear journalists and editors, your readers will see your headline or topic sentence and have no idea that you wrote an article that (hopefully) is about what got axed and what made the cut. 

I know this hasn’t been intentional–again, as I said, JumpStart has had grounds for being newsworthy, and this may happen again. But on this topic, it is time to present the matter more clearly and concretely. Save “JumpStart” as shorthand for talking about progressive taxes, where it actually signals something meaningful. 

If the goal of journalism is to inform the public, journalists ought to prioritize describing spending changes on which programs. Best not to use headlines that suggest the topic of an article is about a fight regarding a special, council-created subcategory of the budget and what its relative size will be.

Tell us about the big line items instead. Please.

For Democrats

Those of us who are Democrats are pretty likely to think our budget shouldn’t be smaller than it was relative to the economy in the down-market and woefully austere days of 2012, and that further eroding spending is an assault on an already beleaguered public realm. So we are jumpy about defunding things currently funded by JumpStart—like affordable housing.

I believe Democrats and our other lefty allies would do well to banish this phrase from our lexicon, but for slightly different reasons than the reporters. We tend to use this framing because we love JumpStart. And sometimes talking about JumpStart makes sense–such as when we are talking about revenue sources–taxes. 

But not when describing what gets spent. 

Because, even if “raiding” is supposed to sound pejorative - as I told the journalists above–“raiding JumpStart” is an abstract, meaningless construct to almost everyone in the voting public. 

And it is the public that we have to reach.

Yawn

If you try to explain that this budget cut is so important because the money will come from a different funding stream with a different plan than the general fund and gosh it was so awesome when Teresa Mosqueda and the rest of the council broke transformative new legal ground (because, let’s be honest, it was SO awesome!) - you will sound like a person talking about an argument at a conference of accountants. (No offense to my accountant friends!)

Most people do not care about moving money around, particularly in ways that are legal. They do not care about the original legislative intent of a tax, long ago–unless the nexus is painfully obvious (soda tax!), and then only maybe. 

They do care about what gets funded and what gets gutted. 

They don’t care about “raiding JumpStart.” 

Say It With Me

If the Council takes JumpStart money away from affordable housing–tell everyone you know they are “cutting funding for affordable housing.” 

Don’t say they are raiding JumpStart. Normal people don’t care. 

Say it with me. “Normal people don’t care about ‘raiding’ one account to fill another.” 

Again.

Likewise, if the Council takes money out from small business assistance, investments in housing, childcare or health clinics in marginalized communities, or in climate readiness for the city–tell the public that is what they did. 

Just please, please, stop saying they are raiding JumpStart.

P.S. - Except for Teresa Mosqueda. She should say whatever she wants about JumpStart. =)