Freeman’s Best of the Web column for September 22 performs the trick it claims to expose.
The column runs against Los Angeles’s Measure ULA — the 2022 transfer tax the LA Times has covered as the “mansion tax” that, by its actual incidence, hits apartment construction. The column accuses progressive politicians of hoodwinking voters with the “mansion tax” euphemism when the tax is, by its actual incidence, an apartment-and-parking tax. The criticism is fair. The column does not notice it is running the relabeling it claims to expose. The column calls the tax a “money grab.” The phrase “money grab” does the pejorative relabeling that the column accuses progressive politicians of doing with the phrase “mansion tax.” The critic is running the trick. The critic is performing the trick. The trick is what the column is.
I built versions of this column on the WSJ editorial page I worked on between 1999 and 2007. The pattern has a name in the rooms where I learned to write it: the mirror pivot. Identify a frame move in the opposing coalition, then run the same move from the other direction. The frame move is exposed. The frame move is performed. The reader is told the trick is happening. The reader is moved by the trick. The column’s preferred conclusion is the take-home. The two cancel in the opposite of what the column wants.
What follows is the column walked through, paragraph by paragraph, technique by technique. The receipts are the column itself. The pattern is the pattern.
The opening graf loads the dock. The phrase “waste significant taxpayer money” presupposes waste has occurred; the rest of the column treats the presupposition as established. The “perfect failure of progressive social policy” frame, named in the same opening sentence, closes the escape hatch — the failure is not in execution, not in design, not in the specific ordinance; the failure is in the policy category itself. Operators of this kind talk about this move as loading the dock: the conclusion is decided before the column starts, then the documentation is arranged around it. The reader who absorbs the phrase, who spends the column inside the loaded frame, believes they reasoned to the conclusion. They did not. They were moved to it. The frame is WSJ §4.1 — frame-engineered relabeling — with Bandura’s attribution of blame and euphemistic labeling running underneath. The piece names a noun phrase — “progressive social policy” — and treats that noun phrase as the cause of the harm. The noun phrase does no analytical work. The noun phrase does all the persuasive work. The reader is invited to a category-blame move in which the city council’s specific design choices, the actual incidence of the tax, the documented effects on apartment construction, and the alternative reform paths never get named, because the column has already named the cause.
The second paragraph runs what the catalogue calls the “blue state failure” frame (WSJ §4.9), through the phrase “La La Land.” Two functions at once. The phrase dismisses the city and its political configuration as unserious. Unseriousness is the diagnosis standing in for the analysis. The phrase also performs a populist-base credibility move — it tells the populist reader that the writer is on their side against the LA governing class. The Flemming quote that follows is presented as journalism. The use to which the quote is put is not journalism. The quote says politicians “conjured” a market where nobody wins; the column reads this as a verdict on progressive governance. The judgment never emerges from the quote on its own. The judgment emerges from the loading. The operator-vernacular name for the move is the credentialed-source cover. A jurisdiction is selected that is governed by the opposing coalition; a journalist there is found who has registered the problem; the journalist is quoted in the column; the journalist’s observation is treated as evidence of structural failure. The journalist’s reporting is the receipt. The structural-political inference is the column’s. The reader who retains the inference as the journalist’s verdict is being moved by a move the journalist did not make.
The third paragraph runs the relabeling in two directions at once, and this is where the mirror pivot becomes visible. The column accuses progressive politicians of running the relabeling — calling the tax a “mansion tax” rather than an “apartment tax” to make it politically saleable. The accusation is the surface. The column itself is running the relabeling. The phrase “money grab” is the column’s pejorative relabeling of Measure ULA, a ballot initiative voters approved to fund homeless housing and affordable housing construction. The phrase concedes the policy goal in passing — “this money grab” is the named referent — then refuses to engage the policy goal. The voters, by the way, are not hoodwinked in the pejorative sense the column wants; they voted for the tax by ballot initiative after a campaign that said where the money would go. The column’s title in the WSJ is “The Mansion Tax That Hits the Middle Class.” The title is itself a relabeling — the tax is on real-estate sales above $5 million, not on the middle class; the only way it hits the middle class is by depressing apartment construction, which raises rents. The column is built so that the euphemism it criticizes — “mansion tax” as cover for an apartment-and-parking tax — gets used as the column’s own euphemism: a high-end real-estate sales tax framed as a middle-class burden. The critic runs the trick. The mirror pivot lands.
The developer’s quote — “Right off the top, you’re subtracting 4% to 5% of the sale price, which is a big piece of your profit” — runs the WSJ catalogue’s austerity-thrift archetype (WSJ §4.2), with Bandura’s moral disengagement operating underneath. One party’s loss gets a specific percentage. The other party’s stakes get a noun phrase. The selective weighting of harms is the move. The developer’s loss gets a number. The unsheltered population the tax was designed to serve gets “the city’s unsheltered homeless population” in the opening graf and disappears from the column after. The single named human being in the column whose interests are presented in detail is the developer. The single named human being in the column whose interests are opposed to the column’s target is the developer. The people the policy was for are the un-named many. The single quote permitted to stand in for “the housing industry” is the developer’s complaint. The policy’s design goal — funding construction of affordable housing for the unsheltered population Measure ULA’s affordable-housing stream is designed to serve — is named in passing in the opening graf and never returns. The technique supplies a permission structure to the reader: a single human being whose interests are opposite the column’s target gets named; the target gets the noun phrase. The reader is invited to feel the developer’s percentage as large. The reader is not invited to ask what the alternative would be.
What the alternative would be is what the column never gets to. Because Measure ULA is a transaction tax — a one-time cut off the top of a sale — and the construction that never happens was going to generate years of property taxes, transfer tax revenue, and income taxes from the people who build, manage, and service the buildings. The column argues the tax destroys developer incentives. The column does not engage the lost revenue from the housing that never gets built. The “money grab” the column names is, by the column’s own logic, smaller than the future stream the column is forfeiting. The moment a developer completes a project, the city reaches in and claws back 4% to 5% of the sale price. That surcharge was never part of the original underwriting of any project now in the pipeline. It is a tax on the last few years of construction labor, paid by the people who write the checks for new homes. In a city screaming for more housing, the supply of new apartments has collapsed. Developers don’t build their way to affordability when the tax code turns every completed building into a loss. No amount of fee waivers or expedited permits offsets that structural subtraction.
The closing rhetorical question runs the WSJ catalogue’s threat-inflation closer (WSJ §4.13) — “What is it going to take for L.A. politicians to stop destroying incentives to build housing?” — and the 2030 forecast extends the harm-horizon past a specific electoral cycle. The cadence is engineered for retransmission. The take-home is that LA’s progressive governance will keep producing housing-supply destruction indefinitely. The forecast is not an analysis. It is a closer. The structural detail the closer does not engage is what the “reform” would consist in. The column has spent its length arguing against a tax whose stated purpose is funding the construction of affordable housing. The reform the closer imagines is the tax’s repeal. The repeal would, by the column’s own logic, restore developer incentives to build. The repeal would also, by the column’s own opening graf, eliminate a funding stream for homeless services. The closer does not mention that trade. The closer performs threat-inflation on the supply side; the closer performs euphemistic labeling on the demand side — the people the policy served disappear from the column at exactly the moment their fate is being decided. This is what the catalogue names a closer running on its own. The reader who retains it has been moved to a position the column never earned the right to move them to.
So here is what the column actually does, taken together. Ask the question the ordinance’s designers don’t want you to ask. Who really benefits?
The city gets its percentage off every large transaction. The anti-development activists get their slowdown. The most plausible winners — the large holders of the existing housing stock — get the tightened rental market and the rising values that come when new supply is suppressed. The losers are diffuse: the young family in a one-bedroom, the service worker in a rent-stabilized unit, the would-be renter who never gets an apartment because the building never gets built. The developers don’t eat the tax. The housing disappears. The costs fall on the diffuse many who look nothing like the “wealthy” the campaign promised to soak. After being alerted to the problem and then considering a change earlier this year, the council opted to reform nothing. That is the verdict on the defenders before the defense even begins: the council was warned, and the council chose to do nothing.
The premise of the defenders fails on its own terms. Raising revenue for homelessness programs is a legitimate public purpose, and a city cannot conjure that money from nothing. But a tax that destroys the base it is levied on does not raise the revenue — it destroys the future revenue. A tax that subtracts 4% to 5% off the top of a building’s sale price is not a rounding error. It is a subtraction of the entire profit margin on a typical project. If the goal were genuinely to reduce homelessness, the fix would target the cost of building, not add to it. A land value tax, with improvements untaxed, would make it more expensive to sit on an empty lot than to build ten units of housing on it. That is the reform that would actually produce homes. The fact that the city instead chose a transaction tax that punishes the highest-value additions to the housing stock tells you everything about whether the goal is housing or headlines.
To those who defend the column as exposing a real problem: rule out the suppressed factor, or retract the blanket claim. If new construction does not respond to the cost of the tax, why is apartment construction collapsing exactly alongside it? If the tax simply falls on the rich, why do the buildings that would house the middle class never get built? Name the vanishing harm the law prevents, then name the very-much-not-vanishing group it burdens — because the people who pay the “mansion tax” are the people who never get an apartment, the construction workers who never get a job, and the small developers who never get a loan.
The people who love the tax never pay it. The people who pay it are the ones who never get the apartment.
So here is what the column actually is, taken together.
The column identifies a relabeling problem. The column runs a relabeling. The column does not notice it has done this. The column identifies the relabeling it has run as the named target of the operation. The column’s preferred conclusion is preserved through the entire performance because the conclusion was not earned — it was loaded.
The trick — to name it in the operator’s vernacular — is that a frame move exposed is a frame move that has not been disarmed. The reader is told the trick is happening. The reader is moved by the trick. The column’s preferred conclusion is the take-home. The reader is left with the column’s load and the column’s conclusion. The frame move the column runs and the frame move the column criticizes are the same move. The reader is supposed to come away seeing progressive politicians as the tricksters. The column has done the trick. The trick is the column.
This column is what the WSJ editorial page produces on this kind of subject when it is running clean. I am calling the pattern from retained-insider recognition — the editorial-page rooms I worked on between 1999 and 2007 produced this construction on housing-tax stories with regularity. It is not a departure. It is the pattern. The receipt is the column itself. The five passages trace a load-to-dock operation performed in five passages. The reader is moved. The conclusion is loaded. The trick runs.
That is what the mirror pivot looks like when it lands.
— Phukher Tarlson