Well taxes would need to be increased on almost everyone, not just those over $250K/yr if we are to control our deficit. The other option is to put those over 250K a year at something outrageous like a 65%+ tax rate which even I, a liberal, would admit was too high.
But there is a wide swath between a 250K household and a 50K household which may or may not be “poor” depending on the household size and location. But a 100K household definitely isn’t poor and that is 2 1/2 times less income than 250K.
I don’t think liberal and conservative are very useful terms. You have to break the question down by issue and a huge number of us are pragmatic: government regulation is the best solution in issue A, free markets/libertarianism is the best solution in issue B, government provision of service is the best solution in issue C…
Why do people think their political beliefs should be dictated by wealth?
There are saints and sinners all across both political and economic strata.
(I do love the story of how coal miners and kin are set to lose their health care insurance)
I used to enjoy schadenfreude as well as anyone, but sometimes it is just too sad.
I remember a Peanuts strip - Linus and Charlie Brown at the “thinking wall”:
Linus: Charlie Brown, do you think live is a series of peaks and valleys?
CB: Yes, I suppose that’s possible
L: Is it possible that you will have one day that’s better than all other days?
CB: I guess that could happen
L: What if you’ve already had it?
I’m definitely getting that “We’ve not only had our best day, we are rushing headlong to find the worst possible one” feeling.
I have been both dirt poor and Quite Comfortable - and my politics have not changed.
I’m not even sure I can address “why I am a conservative” without a novel-length response, featuring whole chapters on specific issues.
If I had to sum it up in condensed form: I think of society and the economy much like people traditionally view an ecosystem. Nobody likes elephant poop, but it provides valuable fertilizer. If you pick it up, the plants die. Nobody wants lion cubs to starve, but if you help every sick lion, they eat all the antelope. For that matter, no one wants antelope to be eaten, but if you stop the lions, the antelope will overgraze and die anyway. It is theoretically possible to manufacture an artificial ecosystem, but it’s hard and there are lots of unintended consequences.
So, all things being equal, let’s stick with the bad things we know before we risk new bad things we create for ourselves.
In practice, of course, I’m much more pro-government than a typical conservative, and I’m closer to Libertarians on social issues.
As for income: I’ve never been above 250k, but I gotta say that I think using income to measure rich or poor is a flawed yardstick. I have a relative who makes almost twice what I do in some years, but she loves to spend it. She recently finished her third bankruptcy.
A lot of people have. For example the anti-war long haired college protesters in the late 1960s/early 1970s have often turned into conventional middle-class Republican suburbanites.
Timewinder nailed it for me in post #4. Nice work.
There ARE people who simply vote the party they think will lower their marginal tax rate with no other considerations. IMO those people are scoundrels.
The OP seems to have fallen into the trap of thinking all, or at least most, people vote on that basis. Not so.
I also think that I should pay more taxes. I have a lot of friends who are no where near as well as I am, and that means they can’t afford higher taxes. They also can’t afford doctors visits.
Higher taxes are what the wealthy pay so they aren’t obligated listen to their poor relatives mooch. A strong social safety net means I’m not worried about saying no. Since we don’t have a strong social safety net, I give up nights at home to spend at church where we house homeless families.
I’d also be a lot happier with less emphasis on the safety net and more emphasis on the idea of wages that properly distribute the fruits of the economy to everybody who contributes, not just to a few who’ve figured out how to capture an especially large fraction of somebody else’s value-add.
As long as Walmart, et al, can outsource half of what ought to be the worker’s income onto the “safety net”, there’ll be more for the major shareholders.
Which is to say that the safety net ought to be there for the ones in true need who can’t be productive. Burdening it with helping the vastly more numerous employed-but-exploited ensures it’ll always be too little too late and also too unpopular to expand.
Poor conservative, earning less than $50,000 a year.
My views are partly influenced by religion, but also because I am very troubled by societal double standards, and I see more from the political left than the political right. I also firmly believe that appeasement does not work in national defense and am very much a military hawk, and hawkish views are more common on the right than the left.
But there are some issues I’ve become a lot more liberal on, too; I now favor legalized marijuana, think America is far too quick to incarcerate, support single-payer health care and I am also very much an environmentalist. (Not the tree-hugger type, more the OCD-ish “I don’t want heavy metals in my drinking water” type.)
The USD55K figure suggested by Little Nemo is median *household *income. Median individual income is around USD35K.
And all of this is a long way from the OP’s decision to label USD250K and up as “rich” and 249.9K and down as “poor” with no third category in the middle.
IMO what he really meant was the “topmost earners” and “the rest of us.” As he said, 250K is a common cutoff in various US political proposals and tax laws where “soak the rich” provisions extend down to there but no farther and “help subsidize the middle class” provisions extend up to there but no farther. *Very *roughly speaking.
I’m poor, and fed up with the never ending shrillness from both extremes of the spectrum, proffered by zealots who have never recognized a shade of gray and believe in the absolute rectitude of every issue possibly associated with their tiny interest wedge which plants them either on the right or the left…
I’m a registered independent, unmarried, straight white male w/ annual gross income ~$150K, so not wealthy, but comfortable. I consider myself to be “moderate” which only means I get my butt kicked by liberals & conservatives alike.
I still don’t understand why a person’s financial status should have a bearing on his personal politics. Is it nothing other than short-range self-interest?
Once you make the vast simplifying assumption that “civil society” is a meaningless term and economics is all there is to human society, then it becomes very plausible to think that people do, or should, vote based on nothing more than their pocketbook.
Connected to the above belief is a caricature of the two US parties that holds: Republican = party of rich people’s economic interests versus Democrats = party of poor people’s economic interests.
It seems the OP has fallen into that belief + caricature. Or at least asked this question based on that view of the world.
IMO he’s far from alone in thinking that way. IMO it’s not right, but it is popular.
I’m a rich enough independent thinker. I don’t have a political orientation, I do believe that everyone should act for the benefit of society as a whole which should benefit me, my family, my friends, and everyone else. Of course that won’t happen but it’s no reason for me to choose a political side which won’t accomplish that either.
There is a reason why they are called “conservative”. The word means an inclination to retain the status quo. The status quo is just fine for those who are already rich, or those who are (or whose husbands are) of a visible (i.e., “white”) hierarchical standing to be favored by the banking class.
Conservatives are, simply put, racist. More racist than they were in the 1950s. They are thinking, That’s OK, we still have the economic power, but it is being threatened, and we’d better be careful it doesn’t slip from our grasp. Thank God, we have a political party on our side.
People don’t vote money anymore, the way they did when all voters were white. They vote color now, in such a way that the money stays white.
A strong social safety net means I’m not worried about saying no. Since we don’t have a strong social safety net, I give up nights at home to spend at church where we house homeless families.