I finally got a chance today to take a look at the progressive plan for balancing the budget that EPI, Demos, and The Century Foundation put out on Monday. There are a lot of smart ideas in the proposal, and it shows that we can deal with long-term budget issues without beating the crap out of the middle class and the poor.
I’ve only got one issue with it: too many words.
Take the Executive Summary. It’s nine freakin’ pages long. Nine. That, my friends, is not an executive summary. By the time an executive is a third of the way down the first page of a summary, their mind is already beginning to float: can I get away with bonking my executive assistant? What do I want to have for lunch today? If you haven’t grabbed them by then and they’ve got more than the rest of the page to go, forget it. Even a policy geek like myself is probably going to stop reading after page two and jump to the actual report.
If their “executive summary” doesn’t give us a bottom line, how about the press release? It’s only a page and a half long, but here’s the first paragraph:
Our Fiscal Security, a collaborative effort of The Century Foundation, Demos and the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), today released Investing in America’s Economy: A Budget Blueprint for Economic Recovery and Fiscal Responsibility. This Blueprint is a comprehensive, detailed roadmap to immediate investments in job creation while addressing the nation’s long-run fiscal challenges. The Blueprint takes a very different approach from other prominent proposals, specifically prioritizing a strong economic recovery because widespread job creation and robust economic growth are essential to successful deficit reduction.
Let’s take the last sentence: “because widespread job creation and robust economic growth are essential to successful deficit reduction.” Really? I’m not saying it had to be as punchy as Demos’ “the middle-class is no accident.” But a sound bite to smack the Republicans upside the head this is not.
Why am I kvetching about the writing of this otherwise fine report (aside from the fact that I’m irritable this morning because I didn’t get enough sleep last night)? Because it’s a problem that an awful lot of progressive policy folks still have. If the media is convinced that you aren’t a Serious Person unless you want to inflict pain on the middle-class and poor folk, it’s going to be hard to punch through. When the odds are against you, you can’t just focus on having good ideas. You’ve also got to write short & sweet — and ideally with a little style.