Rhetoric of the Buffett Rule

I've encountered a number of interesting tidbits about this past week's State of the Union Address.  Here's an unusual analysis (sometimes rhetorical) from The Atlantic's James Fallows.  If you missed the speech, and would like someone to guide you through it, Fallows' annotation might be helpful.

While context matters, sometimes examining words themselves can be a useful tool of rhetorical analysis.  Here's a graphical comparison of keyword frequency in the last twelve SOTU addresses.  (This year's big winners: Taxes and Jobs.)  As you might expect, the current president chooses different words than his predecessor.  

Source: Saul Loeb/Associated Press

Most interesting to me, from  rhetorical perspective, is this piece, again from The Atlantic.  It points out some very peculiar use of numbers when people compare Warren Buffett's tax rate against that of his secretary.  (Frequent comparisons have been made (by Obama, Buffett, and others) between Buffett's effective tax rate of 17% and his secretary's rate of 35%.  Buffett is the third richest person on the planet, and the principle that he shouldn't pay a lower rate--that it's an injustice--was dubbed by Obama as "the Buffett Rule.")  The point being made about disparate tax rates still seems worthy of response, but the creative use of data does hurt the ethos of this argument.