Isn’t this notion as overly simplistic as saying ‘a vote for Democrats is a vote to take your money away and give it to someone else’?
Even if one takes either sentiment with a grain of truth, don’t both completely ignore the why behind each policy–pretending that the Republicans’ policies are solely to make the rich richer is akin to pretending that the reason for the Democrats’ policies are primarily intended make the rich poorer. Both ideas are fodder for Beck or Rush, but neither hold up to a hint of scrutiny. (Not that there aren’t arguments to be made that X policy will have Y implications, just that the context is much more elaborate than a sound bite.)
Furthermore, even taken at its worst, don’t people of *both *parties vote (or support measures) against their interests? For example, I’m extraordinarily partial to protecting (what I see as) the rights of the accused. I favor very strong Fourth Amendment rights. I’ll never need them, and the long-term result (more criminals on the street) could very likely lead to direct harm to me. Yet I would still vote that way. I’m assuming there are plenty of ideals/measures that you support that benefit your conception of society as a whole but can easily be construed as against your personal interests. So why are economic matters different?
Lastly, aren’t there many other things in the Republican platform besides pure economic measures?
Ironically, when I was younger (and didn’t have much if any money) I voted Republican. I haven’t voted Republican since Bush’s daddy’s second term…now that I make more than the criteria in the OP. Still, I can say why I USED to vote Republican:
Fiscal responsibility. A more businesses friendly attitude (which I believed at the time was the engine that drives the economy, creates jobs and does more for increasing standards of living than all the social programs put together, mainly because all those social programs are paid for from taxes that come from a booming economy). Tougher on defense and a more isolationist attitude in their foreign policy (note, as with the above, this was the Republican party in the 70’s and 80’s when I voted for them).
What I disliked was the quasi-religious elements, and the social conservative positions specifically, but there was enough there that I felt they were the party for me at the time.
I have voted Republican in the past (my district previously had a moderate conservative, with reasonable social views, but was ousted as a RINO). I’ve given money to Republicans.
I like fiscal responsibility and think we need to balance budgets and reduce the debt. I want to support businesses and a good business climate. (I am part owner of a small business.) I think our federal government could stand to be a lot smaller. I think I have an absolute right to keep personal guns. I don’t want a nanny state.
But since the mid-2000s, I can’t support the types of folks the tea party advocates and right wing Christianists are pushing. I don’t want to police what people do in their bedrooms or who they can marry. I don’t want religion pushed by government or schools. I don’t think torture and extraordinary rendition is a reasonable way for a government to operate. I think it is time that gays should be allowed to serve in the military. I used to advocate for a free market healthcare, but after years of failure, I support healthcare reform by the government. (Face it, ‘Obamacare’ isn’t socialism – it is basically the Republican plan from the 1990s.)
My take on the OP - The Republicans have put together a coalition of wealthy people persuaded by economic issues and poor people persuaded by social/religious issues (and poorly educated people persuaded by lies and propaganda).
When I married my wife 29 years ago I had $100 in my wallet, standing at the altar. That’s all the money we had in the world. I made $6,000 per year as a teaching assistant at a major university and she worked as an office manager.
Now we are in the class that Obama targets as “rich”, in an effort to divide the electorate and pit interest groups against each other in a brazen attempt at partisan class-warfare.
I’ve worked my ass off my entire life, lived well below my means until this present day (and accumulated savings along the way as a result, that allow me and my family to live comfortably). Nobody has given me anything.
I get deeply offended when a politician insinuates how I don’t really deserve my hard-earned money and it needs to go instead to bail out banks, protect sugar farmers, fund ACORN and NPR (the latter which I love, and support), give raises to useless teachers unions, grow the more-useless federal Dept of Education, slap high tariffs on steel imports, pay out retirement benefits to senior citizens who never put as much money in as they are taking out and neither deserve nor need it, or to fund vast new healthcare bureaucracies that will tell me what I can and cannot do with my choices and my employee’s choices.
I get especially offended when the politician is someone who hasn’t spend a second in the private sector for their entire life, and surrounds himself with same, yet tells me that if they take my money they know how to create jobs, grow the economy and lift living standards for my fellow citizens. I either laugh or cry, depending on what mood I’m in at the moment.
I don’t necessarily vote Republican. I vote either Libertarian or Republican most of the time, and I voted for Paul Tsongas once.
I will vote for anybody who shows even a shred of demonstrable evidence from their past, or even tells a good story in absence of evidence, about slowing and/or reversing the growth of government intrusion in areas where it doesn’t belong.
And the areas where it “does belong” are small and well-defined. The candidate can be Republican, Libertarian, Democrat, Green, Purple, Rastafarian or an Alien from Mars as far as I care.
The Bush Republicans from 2000-2006 (when the Democrats took over Congress) were very bad in this regard. The Democrats under Obama/Pelosi/Reid are jaw-dropping, head-shaking, cover-your-eyes-awful beyond any possible cartoon caricature of tax-and-spend liberals.
When I was a lot more inclined to be Republican (circa 1990s), I was making low wages ($20-25k). Until I got married two months ago, I’d have fit the OP’s economic criteria.
My reasons would have been largely a reaction away from my my liberal phase. (The first vote I ever cast was for Jesse Jackson in the 1988 Democratic primary.) After years of working in homeless shelters, inner-city housing projects and the like, I had come to believe that most government-run (and democrat-championed) welfare and aid programs were of marginal utility, and often counterproductive.
Moreover, I believed Republicans would do a relatively better job of creating economic growth, and that was a better help to the poor than a boatload of entitlements.
Finally, I believed that many liberals embraced of attitudes and mindsets that were inimical to a healthy society: e.g. lack of personal responsibility, class envy, fostering racial division, anti-patriotism, foreign policy grounded in naive idealism, willingness to subordinate rule of law to advance policy preferences, etc.
I still think all of that; however, I mostly stopped voting for Republicans because some of my moral positions have shifted (I am mostly pro-choice, and mostly pro-gay marriage), because I was sickened by the distance between Republican economic rhetoric and reality, and because I’ve come to the conclusion that many conservatives also encourage attitudes and mindsets that are inimical to a healthy society: provincialism, anti-intellectualism, moralism, foreign policy grounded in naive idealism, willingness to subordinate rule of law to advance policy preferences, etc. For me, Terry Schiavo was the last straw.
Having said that, I’m still way closer to the GOP than the DP.
Okay, I’ll give you a more specific answer. But first, may I point out that when you’re asking Republicans/Conservatives to help you and give you honest answers and take your question seriously, it might help if you refrain from commentary about the gross lies Republicans tell. At least in the same freaking thread. I don’t know if you realize just how rude that is.
Anyway…
I grew up in a poor household. We were the only non-welfare family in the project that I knew about. So I got to see up-front and personal what welfare does to people. And what I saw was a whole bunch of angry single mothers who sat around all day drinking coffee with each other and watching soap operas, while complaining bitterly that the government just wasn’t doing enough for them. They used to talk about how it was impossible for them to work, because after all they had to look after their kids, and they didn’t have cars and it wasn’t easy to travel, and yada yada yada. And yet, they didn’t do a particularly good job looking after their kids, their apartments were often a mess, and they didn’t even keep themselves up. It was institutional laziness.
Of course, these attitudes were promoted by the welfare workers and ‘community activists’ who came around and validated everyone’s feelings about how miserable life was, how the government wasn’t doing enough for them, how it wasn’t their fault they were in the situation they were in, etc. It was basically a factory for producing people utterly unwilling to look after themselves.
In the meantime, MY mother was a single mom, and WE didn’t have a car either. But she went to work. And we had less than those welfare families did - at first. However, it’s funny how when you actually go out and work in the world and do a good job and focus more on being a good employee rather than bitching about what a bastard your boss and his company are, opportunities tend to arise. So eventually my mom worked her way out of that dependency hellhole, we bought a small duplex, she became a store manager by and by, and she worked her way out of poverty and into the lower middle class. The welfare ladies stayed exactly where they were.
Then when I got older and went to college (which I had to work to pay for), I saw the other side - the earnest, angry young liberals out to ‘save’ the poor. Most of them were from upper middle class homes, and didn’t have the foggiest notion of what it was like to be poor. Nonetheless, they were sure they knew what poor people needed. And they generally had the same kind of ugly mix of attitudes towards the hoi polloi you see on this board - a combination of sneering disdain for the ‘trailer trash’, coupled with the firm conviction that the same people are utterly helpless to lift themselves up without the benevolent guidance of people such as themselves.
Overlaid on this was the cold war, and I thought the left was firmly on the wrong side of most cold-war issues. In college bull sessions it was common to hear some young upper-crust Marxist or socialist expound on the wonderful health care and education Soviet children got, and how everything there was at least equal and there were no evil capitalists exploiting the workers and they were leading the world into a bright future. Whereas I thought the Soviet Union truly was an evil empire that had more real inequality than the west had.
On my campus, the left marched in favor of the Sandinistas, marched against American ‘imperialism’ while explaining away uncomfortable things like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (“You can’t blame them! The Soviets just want a buffer around them because they’ve been attacked so many times.”) Their heads were so firmly up their own posteriors it was a miracle they could breathe and talk.
As I’ve gotten older and more well-off, I’ve seen nothing to change my mind about the destructive effects of welfare. Here in Canada, our angriest populations are the ones that get the most government benefits. The same is true around the world. Look at the rioting going on in France today.
I think ‘community organizers’ are essentially political activists who agitate within their communities to convince people that they are victims of the upper class, in order to gain power over them by becoming their spokemen and ultimately their decision-makers. I think that this kind of class warfare agitprop is destructive to the long-term health of a society.
I think that to maintain the narrative that the poor are the victims of the rich, the left has to demonize success, which helps destroy the incentive to build and create. The left believes that CEOs didn’t do anything special to get where they are, that they are overvalued, and that the rich get that way by exploiting the poor. I believe the rich are generally rich because they have provided more value to society and have been compensated for it. The left’s role models are political activists and union leaders. Mine are people like Burt Rutan, who is building a space program through hard work and brains. And getting rich doing it.
I think that when you subsidize bad behavior you get more of it. I think that it’s bad to give people such a soft safety net that they have little incentive to climb out of it, in the same way that I believe it’s bad for parents to allow their adult children to live at home when they should be out making their own lives and working. It just breeds dependency.
I believe that people should be treated as free beings with a right to succeed or fail based on their own decisions. I think it’s destructive to the human spirit to tell people they are powerless in the face of shadowy corporate forces and rich people keeping them down, and that they need to vote for a certain kind of government that will punish the successful and give the proceeds to people who haven’t earned it.
I believe in maintaining a strong defense against those who would take your freedom away, and that includes the right to own guns and maintaining a military powerful enough to counter any perceived threats, current or extrapolated into the near future.
I believe that the best charity is local. I believe that government power should diminish with distance. A federal government making decisions 2000 miles away from me should have very little power over my life. A local or provincial government should have more power, both because it’s more likely to understand my needs and also because I have more freedom to move away from it should I not like what it does.
I believe that liberal policies have destroyed families, encouraged single parenthood, created divisions between classes and between management and labor, and politicized many things that should not be political - especially not at a federal level.
I believe that when you give the government the responsibilty for the nation’s health care, you open the door to the government restricting your liberties on the grounds that what you do to yourself now affects other taxpayers. We hear arguments like that in Canada all the time.
I don’t agree with everything conservatives to, either. I have particular problems with the ‘religious right’. But on balance I find them to be far less dangerous to society, to the country, and to my freedoms than I do the liberals, who seek to increasingly control and regulate the minutae of everyday life.
I’ve believed these things since the earliest age I can remember. And I wasn’t indoctrinated by my family - they were apolitical. I just seem to have been born with a powerful need for self-determination and a belief that I’m responsible for my own behavior and that I don’t have a right to have what I didn’t earn, and neither does anyone else. The rest pretty much flows from that.
Because even back when Harry Truman said it, the Republican party is the party of big money and big power. This is not new. Look at the Bush Tax cuts and the gutting of regulation if you can not understand it.
Abortion is strange. the Repubs have the Court, they had the presidency and the house and senate. I missed when they did something about abortion. They don’t ,because if it became illegal, they would lose the single issue voters that they dangle a carrot in front of. Anti-abortion fans are being played and have been for a long time.
You’ve got to be kidding. Why don’t you check out the revolving door between the Democrats in government and lucrative positions in top level law firms, lobbying firms, CEO positions at government-connected firms like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or the boards of large financial firms like Goldman Sachs?
The Democrats outspent Republicans in the last election. They have big money sponsors just like Republicans do. Media Matters for America is funded by George Soros, one of the richest men in the world. The Kennedys are one of the richest families in America. Prominent Democrats have including some of the richest Americans, such as the Rockefellers.
Nine of the Top 15 richest members of Congress in 2010 are Democrats. Under the Democrat’s plans, profits on Wall Street have skyrocketed, while middle America continues to shed jobs.
In the meantime, the current crop of new Republicans were elected by a truly grass-roots movement composed primarily of middle-class people.
[and saw first hand many negative aspects of welfare/handouts/liberal agenda.]
This is a very common thing I hear from poor/lower middle folks I talk with. They see the bad effects of welfare and it sours them on the “liberal agenda” which republicans run against. It helps turn them into firm republican supporters. It is hard to argue with that.
Welfare reform still has a long way to go, but it did get a serious overhaul in the 90s. Few democrats are running on “give lots of welfare to the poor” now.
The democratic party in general has shifted rightward from the liberal ‘tax-and-spend’ handouts to the poor, etc. to more moderate, centrist policies, while the republican party has shifted further rightward to extreme social/religious/economic insanity.
That was enough to shift me from republican support to democratic support.
Nelson Rockefeller, at least, was a Republican and was Ford’s VP. Although a Republican in the 1970’s probably has more in common with the Democrats today, so maybe your point still stands.
Postulate: In a capitalist society, it is absolutely inherent that there will be winners and losers. A healthy capitalist society would help to ensure that the number of “losers” will be minimized, preferably by giving them healthy wages for work performed and plenty of jobs for them to do in the first place, and a safety net for when (not if) things go bad for someone somewhere & their family, through whatever reasons, and would attempt to get them back on their feet ASAP.
I get the feeling that conservatives have this notion that we can divide society, not into 2 sets of haves vs. have-nots, but into those who are willing to work hard vs. those who are lazy and just want to wait for their next govt. handout, and absolutely no extenuating circumstances need apply when someone is laid off and can’t find anything new. But that ignores the vast swath of people in the excluded middle who have been working their asses off, but for minimal benefit, declining wages vs. inflation, and soaring auxilary costs (like oh I don’t know health insurance), some of whom then get fired anyway despite their best efforts. How exactly have Republican policies helped them over the past 30 years? [Note: the Dems do share the blame too, but for only slightly different reasons and not so much because they “enabled” welfare recipients.]
I won’t even mention the dangers of drawing firm conclusions from singular personal experiences and then applying them broad brush to everyone/everywhere else, or with assuming that the current state of affairs is the worst of all possible worlds. Would anyone prefer the kinds of “divisions” between classes which existed before child labor and work safety laws? Many things of this sort were undoubtedly “political” before someone called attention to them-they don’t magically become “political” the instant someone points out the serious flaws in such policies and then suggests solutions to them.
My ultimate point is that the reasons for the current state of affairs in the US/Western world are complex, and can’t be reduced to simplistic talking points by playing “gotcha” games and tossing all the blame onto one “side” (that includes assuming that there are two sides, that Democratism and Republicanism represent the only two choices we can make, but that’s another topic).
Which does not make the GOP any less the party of big money and big power. It is that exactly.
And, yes, so are the Dems, to only slightly lesser degree.
What we need is a major party that is not that at all. And the Democratic Party at any rate offers better prospects for transformation in that regard than the GOP does.
My basic answers would be that I agree with the party platforms; gun rights, pro-life, low taxation and regulation, anti-union, strong defense.
Maybe Republicans like to plan for the future. I’m not rich now, but would like to have a fair chance to become wealthy and stay there when I make it, instead of having my wealth spread around.