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Seems to me the solution to that problem is to fix the problems with American schools that produce such illiterate citizens, rather than continue dumbing everything down.

When I was in school, the kids that had the best grades and were in all the good programs always ended up reading. aloud. like. this.

I don't know what that means.

No one said an author shouldn’t choose what words to write. They are astonished people want browsers to choose. If politicians want a to use simple words, good for them.

This is a reason to use more (appropriate/useful) words, not fewer. Politics is one of the few contexts where you are explicitly addressing the largest and most horizontally sampled set of people possible. Politicians speak that way out of necessity.