Ep 240: How the Media's "Burden," the "Straining Resources" Framing Manufactures the Expendable Other

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.

**Nima Shirazi** (0:08)
Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.

**Adam Johnson** (0:16)
I'm Adam Johnson.

**Nima Shirazi** (0:17)
You can follow the show on Twitter and Blue Sky at CitationsPod Facebook, Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through patreon.com/citationsneededpodcast.
All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100 percent listener funded. We don't run ads. We have no commercials. We have no corporate sponsors. We don't get grant money from nonprofits or foundations. We are able to do this show and stay totally editorially independent because of the generous and ongoing support of listeners like you.

**Adam Johnson** (0:48)
A little bit goes a long way. If you have some couch cushion change and you do listen, please do go to our Patreon and sign up. We have a lot of people who listen, a very small percentage who actually give to the Patreon. So if you can do that, we'd be very grateful. It helps keep the episodes free and the show sustainable.

**Nima Shirazi** (1:04)
The Cost of Saving Babies Drains Healthcare Cost of Saving Babies Drains Healthcare announced the Associated Press in 1992
Elder Influx Bound to Tax Healthcare and Other Services cautioned the same news agency again in 2004
Chicago Begins Evicting Migrants from Shelters Citing Strain on Resources stated the New York Times in 2024

**Adam Johnson** (1:32)
For centuries, we've been told that certain populations, whether in need of specialized medical care or education, or specific accommodations, or whether moving from one place to another are a strain on our resources. Supposedly, seniors and people with disabilities are causing health care costs to skyrocket. Immigrants are overcrowding schools and causing teacher and textbook shortages. People without permanent housing are filling up clinics and shelters. And it's all on the taxpayer's dime.

**Nima Shirazi** (1:58)
It's undeniable that local and state governments operate vital resources. Medicaid, public schools, subsidized housing, with insufficient funding already. And that these resources can indeed be, and are indeed by design, by manufactured austerity, zero sum. But instead of placing the blame on artificial policy decisions that don't plan for increased need, or strip those essential programs of the funding they need to reach their full potential, the burden framing scapegoats the vulnerable people who rely on these programs, simply because they have needs and have committed the unforgivable crime of existing in the first place.

**Adam Johnson** (2:37)
Why should we be expected to accept that a person is a strain simply for needing housing, education, and healthcare? Why is the obscene resource consumptions of the 1% who sit upon sprawling estates, fly private jets, and sail in megayachts not said to be a strain on the planet facing catastrophic climate chaos?

**Nima Shirazi** (2:54)
And how does this framing of sorting out good and bad resources consumption, where the villain is always the poor and desperate, condition audiences to resent members of their own communities and view public funding of societal goods as a bad thing?

**Adam Johnson** (3:11)
On today's episode, we'll dissect the strain on resources framing, examine how it's disproportionately applied to undesirable populations like immigrants, seniors, disabled people, and homeless people, how it conveniently skips over resource-intense military spending and AI bubble energy demands, how it serves as a pretext to further defund socially beneficial programs, and how it conditions audiences to view essential public investment as a form of stealing from the always put upon the holiest of the holies, the most important moral agent of all, the American taxpayer.

**Nima Shirazi** (3:41)
Later on the show, we'll be joined by Beatrice Adler-Bolton, co-host of the Death Panel Podcast and co-author with Artie Virkant of the book Health Communism, A Surplus Manifesto, which was published in 2022 by Verso Books.

**Beatrice Adler-Bolton** (3:55)
Some of the most important political work that the framing of burden or strain budgets, tough choices, hard trade-offs, this kind of talk accomplishes is really it ultimately is about reorganizing the field of what feels like a legitimate question in the first place, long before it's ever justifying decisions to specifically discipline or expand an X or Y group of people.

**Adam Johnson** (4:20)
This episode is going to be about the media framing of undervalued populations as strains on resources and their complete lack of inverse framing of very wasteful and intensive military, police and corporate tax breaks to the wealthy, not in those terms. We are aware there is a such thing as finite resources largely propped up by the artificial scarcity regime we talked about on the show a lot, where a federal government deficit spins to send countless bombs and F-35s to Israel can bomb toddlers. But mysteriously, state budgets have to tighten the belt and keep the books and can never be assisted by a federal government, which again prints money out of thin air when it comes to bailing out McMansions in Florida after hurricanes. And this austerity regime, which is defended by federalism, which again is just another thing that people made up, it's not a law of nature, creates genuine resource strains for local and state governments. The actual people running these governments, the mayors, the governors, aren't lying. They don't actually have the money. They cannot deficit spend like the federal government. And because we live in a country that both the media and political culture simply accepts this lack of federal assistance for state and local funding as inevitable, which again is not something that exists in China or dozens of other countries. It's simply a thing we made up.