White House Uses #40dollars Twitter Campaign to Influence Payroll Tax Debate



The White House is taking its fight over payroll tax to Twitter with a campaign using the hashtag #40dollars that asks what you can buy with that amount.

The figure is the average weekly amount that American workers save under the current payroll tax cut, which the White House would like to see extended. The House voted on Tuesday to reject a Senate compromise that would have expanded the tax cut for two months.

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The @whitehouse Twitter account, which has 2.5 million followers, launched the campaign with the above tweet on Tuesday night.

More than 17,000 people have responded to the question, among them @bardandbarker who tweeted: “#40dollars for me is 2 dr appts, or nearly 2 mos of vet care for Amy.” Ashley E. Sweeney at @AshleyESweeney also tweeted, “#40dollars means driving from Chicago to Battle Creek, Michigan, to see my family this Christmas.”

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The #40dollars hashtag has also been a trending topic on Twitter in Washington, D.C., among other places. The administration has Storified many of the responses.

The White House has launched other Twitter hashtag campaigns, including one employing #immigration to discuss a speech by President Obama on that issue in May. The #40dollars hashtag may be the most successful to date, says Macon Phillips, director of new media at the White House.

“Too many people in D.C. see $40 a paycheck as just a rhetoric point,” Phillips told Mashable. “The #40dollars campaign puts a face on that amount to demonstrate the payroll tax cut’s real-world impact on middle-class families.”

In the most optimistic scenario for the White House, the campaign would use public sentiment to force Speaker of the House John Boehner to call another vote in the House to greenlight the extension. Falling short of that, however, Twitter has allowed the White House to frame the debate as a fight between workers who benefit from the tax cut and an obstructionist GOP. Boehner has said he rejected the measure as a stopgap solution and wants a one-year deal. Republicans had opposed an extension to the tax cut a few weeks ago.

Eager to foment more support for the extension, the White House is running a countdown on whitehouse.gov until the tax cuts expire on Jan. 1. The site is also hosting an Office Hours chat at 3:30 p.m. EST manned by Brian Deese, deputy director of the National Economic Council.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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