Could the Dems win the white-working-class vote by getting more aggressively progressive?

[Buck_Godot]

@BrainGlutton

Maybe so, but sooner or later you gotta give 'em some steak to go with the sizzle.

I don’t know, the Republicans current hold on the WMC is pretty much entirely through sizzle. People don’t seem to be getting tired of voting against their interests.

[RTFirefly]

@Buck_Godot

I don’t know, the Republicans current hold on the WMC is pretty much entirely through sizzle. People don’t seem to be getting tired of voting against their interests.

The argument (which I agree with to some extent) is that the Dems have lost the WMC/WWC by not being all that strong in defending the economic interests of that group. Where were the Dems, for instance, when a lot of those folks were being foreclosed on? How often in the past five years have the Dems offered compromises that would raise the Medicare eligibility age, or reduce the size of the annual Social Security cost increase?

That executive order the other day where Obama closed some of those loopholes where employers were able to exclude fairly low-paid employees from overtime pay because they were ‘supervisors’ and stuff? Those loopholes were created by a Bush executive order. How come it took Obama five years to reverse it?

The Democratic Party gives a pretty blurry picture when it comes to whether they’re helping working people of limited means. You can’t blame people who don’t pay nearly as much attention as we do for failing to realize that the Dems are on their side. It isn’t always clear to me, either.

[Chronos]

Public school vs. private school isn’t the real issue. Someone making 100k a year might still send their kids to public school… But they’ve very carefully chosen to live in an affluent suburb where the public schools are high quality. They’re still paying for that higher-quality education; they’re just paying in a different way. Find me someone making 100k in the city of Cleveland, though, and I guarantee you that their children are not going to be in public schools.

[Marley23]

@RTFirefly

We’re not talking about straight-up middle class - that’s your $50K. We’re talking about upper middle class.

Fair enough, but the phrase “middle class” still implies that these people imply a substantially similar economic position. I have trouble believing that’s the case.

I think that if you’re going to draw the line between upper middle class and upper class somewhere, it’s got to be at a level that reflects a genuine change in lifestyle between most people who are, say, $20K below the line and most people $20K above the line.

If $100K isn’t that different from $200K, how are we going to find an important $20K interval between, say, $400K and $500K?

There’s going to be some level of income where you tend to get the gated community or exclusive neighborhood, the golf club membership, and the default being that the kids all go to private schools. That’s where I’d draw the line between upper middle class and upper class, wherever that is. All I know is, it’s a very different world from the one I live in; I don’t even know anyone on that planet.

I think maybe that level is even rarer and more exclusive than you think it is, and that years of rhetoric about how this is “upper middle class” rather than “upper class” or just plain rich have distorted the discussion.

[BrainGlutton]

@Marley23

Fair enough, but the phrase “middle class” still implies that these people imply a substantially similar economic position. I have trouble believing that’s the case.

Relevant recent GD thread.

[Evil_Captor]

@Buck_Godot

I don’t know, the Republicans current hold on the WMC is pretty much entirely through sizzle. People don’t seem to be getting tired of voting against their interests.

This. The Pubs have even sold the WMC on the notion that Social Security and Medicare are entitlements! As if they were getting it just because they were, like, entitled to it cause they’re Americans. Look, you ninnies, on your every paystub is the amount taken out of your salary to PAY FOR Medicare and Social Security! It’s not an entitlement, it is something you have PAID FOR, that you have EARNED!!!

And the people who want to take it from you … they’re not statesmen, or even politicians. They’re thieves.

But the WMC that votes Republican doesn’t see that because they are, collectively, as dumb as a box of rocks.

[Qin_Shi_Huangdi]

@Ravenman

With books like Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America, and Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics; and articles like The 1 percent wins again: The system’s so fixed that a global class war is only a dream; Tea Party’s austerity virus: How Washington lost its fiscal mind; Progressives have a “wimp” problem: Punch a bully in the nose!; Here’s how GOP Obamacare hypocrisy backfires; The South is holding America hostage; How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government; The right doesn’t trust the average American; the claim that he’s a good thinker does not disqualify my echo chamber comment.

Have you read the books or the articles? Mr. Lind’s political work is in general characterized by a heavy citation of facts and statistics. Also this implies that the progressives and the Tea Party are equivalent, which they are not.

[BrainGlutton]

@Qin_Shi_Huangdi

Have you read the books or the articles? Mr. Lind’s political work is in general characterized by a heavy citation of facts and statistics. Also this implies that the progressives and the Tea Party are equivalent, which they are not.

Up from Conservatism is particularly telling. Lind used to be an editor for The National Review. By his account, he broke from conservatism without changing his own politics, because the movement itself had drifted radically rightward. And, we’re talking early 1990s here, before the Tea Party ever was heard of.

[Ravenman]

@Qin_Shi_Huangdi

Mr. Lind’s political work is in general characterized by a heavy citation of facts and statistics.

i read the article linked in the OP in which he quoted a NYT article on issues for which white blue collar voters are more liberal than expected, and ignored the paragraph on issues for which those voters are more conservative than expected.

Is it common practice for him to select which facts he presents in such a fashion so as to be convenient to his argument? Or was this an aberration?

[Tzigone]

I don’t really see that between $100K and $200K. At the latter income, you still probably aren’t in a gated community or anywhere else that’s particularly exclusive. At either income, you live somewhere where your kids can go to a ‘good’ public school. If you want to send them to private school, you can afford it more easily at $200K, but you can still do it at $100K. You’re somewhat more likely to at $200K than at $100K, but at either income, you’re more likely to keep your kids in public school, which is a good school anyway.

If there isn’t much difference, it’s because you make so much money, anyway. Point of diminishing returns. If Bill Gates makes an extra billion next year, no difference in his lifestyle. If someone making 20K a year makes an extra 10K - big difference. The more you make, the more you have to make for it to make a dramatic (to you) difference in your lifestyle. We have to set the separation point somewhere.

And, of course, a lot of people don’t consider a 20% bigger house, new cards more often, a longer vacation, a lawn service and a cleaning service to be different than life without them but it is. Likewise not spending that excess and having savings makes a huge difference. Lose your job - you can still pay your mortgage/rent for months. Get sick or break a bone, and you don’t have to worry about one trip/prescription putting you in debt. Car trouble - don’t need a payday loan with excessive interest or to risk not being able to get to work and losing your job because you either have another car, can afford to have yours repaired quickly, and/or can rent one.

[RTFirefly]

@Tzigone

If there isn’t much difference, it’s because you make so much money, anyway. Point of diminishing returns. If Bill Gates makes an extra billion next year, no difference in his lifestyle. If someone making 20K a year makes an extra 10K - big difference. The more you make, the more you have to make for it to make a dramatic (to you) difference in your lifestyle. We have to set the separation point somewhere.

And, of course, a lot of people don’t consider a 20% bigger house, new cards more often, a longer vacation, a lawn service and a cleaning service to be different than life without them but it is.

Yeah, but those are all differences around the margins. Like I said, a lot of little differences, but not any really big ones. And I’d question whether $200K gets you longer vacations than $100K.

Likewise not spending that excess and having savings makes a huge difference. Lose your job - you can still pay your mortgage/rent for months. Get sick or break a bone, and you don’t have to worry about one trip/prescription putting you in debt. Car trouble - don’t need a payday loan with excessive interest or to risk not being able to get to work and losing your job because you either have another car, can afford to have yours repaired quickly, and/or can rent one.

This was true at $100K. Still true at $200K.

Anyway, what is ‘rich’ since it’s the next thing over ‘upper middle class’? My concept of ‘rich’ has always been: you can quit working, and enough money keeps rolling in that you still have an affluent lifestyle.

That may not be everyone’s definition of ‘rich,’ but I’d have a hard time with a POV that ‘rich’ was a year’s cushion if you lose your job, because then the difference between ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ is just one bad year.

[RTFirefly]

Part of the problem, I think, is that we’ve only got two terms - ‘upper middle class’ and ‘rich’ to cover a lot of ground. ‘Upper middle class’ denotes - and *should *denote, given the scarcity of ‘classes’ we’ve got to work with - a very different experience than straight-up middle class. And ‘rich’ should denote a very different experience than ‘upper middle class.’

[BrainGlutton]

@RTFirefly

Part of the problem, I think, is that we’ve only got two terms - ‘upper middle class’ and ‘rich’ to cover a lot of ground. ‘Upper middle class’ denotes - and *should *denote, given the scarcity of ‘classes’ we’ve got to work with - a very different experience than straight-up middle class. And ‘rich’ should denote a very different experience than ‘upper middle class.’

From Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (originally published 1983), by Paul Fussell:

My researches have persuaded me that there are nine classes in this country, as follows:

Top out-of-sight
Upper
Upper middle

Middle
High proletarian
Mid-proletarian
Low proletarian

Destitute
Bottom out-of-sight

One thing to get clear at the outset is this: it’s not riches alone that define these classes. . . . “Economically, no doubt, there are only two classes, the rich and the poor,” says George Orwell, “but socially there is a whole hierarchy of classes, and the manners and traditions learned by each class in childhood are not only very different but – this is the essential point – generally persist from birth to death. . . . It is . . . very difficult to escape, culturally, from the class into which you have been born.” When John Fitzgerald Kennedy, watching Richard Nixon on television, turned to his friends and, horror-struck, said, “The guy has no class,” he was not talking about money.

<snip>

We now come to the upper-middle class. It may possess virtually as much as the two classes above it. The difference is that it has earned most of it, in law, medicine, oil, shipping, real estate, or even the more honorific kinds of trade, like buying and selling works of art. Although they may enjoy some inherited money and use inherited “things” (silver, Oriental rugs), the upper-middles suffer from a bourgeois sense of shame, a conviction that to live on the earnings of others, even forebears, is not nice.

Caste marks of the upper-middles would include living in a house with more rooms than you need, except perhaps when a lot of “overnight guests” are present to help you imitate upper-class style. . . . This class is also the most “role-reversed” of all: men think nothing of cooking and doing housework, women of working out of the house in journalism, theater, or real estate. (If the wife stays home all the time, the family’s middle-class only.) Upper-middles like to show off their costly educations by naming their cats Spinoza, Clytemnestra, and Candide, which means, as you’ll have inferred already, that it’s in large part the class depicted by Lisa Birnbach and others’ Official Preppy Handbook, that significantly popular artifact of 1980.

<snip>

. . . The middle class is distinguishable more by its earnestness and psychic insecurity than by its middle income. I have known some very rich people who remain stubbornly middle-class, which is to say they remain terrified at what others think of them, and to avoid criticism are obsessed with doing everything right. . . .

“Status panic”: that’s the affliction of the middle class, according to C. Wright Mills, author of White Collar (1951) and The Power Elite (1956). Hence the middles’ need to accumulate credit cards and take in The New Yorker, which it imagines registers upper-middle taste. . . .

If the audience for that sort of thing used to seem the most deeply rooted in time and place, today it seems the class that’s the most rootless. Members of the middle class are not only the sort of people who buy their own heirlooms, silver, etc. They’re also the people who do most of the moving long-distance (generally to very unstylish places), commanded every few years to pull up stakes by the corporations they’re in bondage to. They are the geologist employed by the oil company, the computer programmer, the aeronautical engineer, the salesman assigned to a new territory, and the “marketing” (formerly sales) manager deputed to keep an eye on him. . . . IBM and DuPont hire these people from second-rate colleges and teach them that they are nothing if not members of the team. Virtually no latitude is permitted to individuality or the milder forms of eccentricity, and these employees soon learn to avoid all ideological statements. . . . Terrified of losing their jobs, these people grow passive, their humanity diminished as they perceive themselves mere parts of an infinitely larger structure. Interchangeable parts, too. “The training makes our men interchangeable,” an IBM executive was once heard to say.

<snip>

. . . Proceeding downward, we would normally expect to meet next the lower-middle class. But it doesn’t exist as such any longer, having been pauperized by the inflation of the 1960s and 1970s and transformed into the high-proletarian class. What’s the difference? A further lack of freedom and self-respect. Our former lower-middle class, the new high proles, now head “the masses,” and even if they are positioned at the top of the proletarian classes, still they are identifiable as people things are done to. They are in bondage – to monetary policy, rip-off advertising, crazes and delusions, mass low culture, fast food, consumer schlock. Back in the 1940s there was still a real lower-middle class in this country, whose solid high-school education and addiction to “saving” and “planning” maintained it in a position – often precarious, to be sure – above the working class. . . . These former low-white-collar people are now simply working machines, and the wife usually works as well as the husband.

The kind of work performed and the sort of anxiety that besets one as a result of work are ways to divide the working class into its three strata. The high proles are the skilled workers, craftsmen, like printers. The mid-proles are operators, like Ralph Kramden, the bus driver. The low proles are unskilled labor, like longshoremen. The special anxiety of high proles is fear about loss or reduction of status: you’re proud to be a master carpenter, and you want the world to understand clearly the difference between you and a laborer. The special anxiety of the mid-proles is fear of losing the job. And of the low proles, the gnawing perception that you’re probably never going to make enough or earn enough freedom to have and do the things you want.

[adaher]

@RTFirefly

Part of the problem, I think, is that we’ve only got two terms - ‘upper middle class’ and ‘rich’ to cover a lot of ground. ‘Upper middle class’ denotes - and *should *denote, given the scarcity of ‘classes’ we’ve got to work with - a very different experience than straight-up middle class. And ‘rich’ should denote a very different experience than ‘upper middle class.’

But from a policy perspective their interests are pretty much exactly the same. Which is why Democrats are trying to drive a wedge between the two with a $250,000 cutoff. The fewer people that pay taxes, the more don’t care about the tax issue, which is the primary weakness of the Democrats in elections.

Of course, the downside is that you can only fund a small government by taxing primarily the ultra wealthy. The middle class is where the revenue is.

[Evil_Captor]

@adaher

But from a policy perspective their interests are pretty much exactly the same. Which is why Democrats are trying to drive a wedge between the two with a $250,000 cutoff. The fewer people that pay taxes, the more don’t care about the tax issue, which is the primary weakness of the Democrats in elections.

Of course, the downside is that you can only fund a small government by taxing primarily the ultra wealthy. The middle class is where the revenue is.

No it’s not. From Business Insider:

The bottom 80% of Americans hold only 11% of the wealth and a mere 5% of the financial wealth.

Read more: Charts on US Inequality

To flip that around, 95% of American’s financial wealth is held by the top 20 percent of Americans. THAT’S where the money is. THAT’S who we need to be taxing.

[ElvisL1ves]

… and if they’re “job creators”, they’ve been doing a piss-poor job of it, so don’t start with that shit.

It’s an integral part of the party-loyalist ethos that the ongoing transfer of wealth from the working classes to the idle rich, ever since the Reagan tax cuts that destroyed the budget, is not significant or even real - and that to suggest that it is constitutes “class warfare”, and that any attempt to mend that redistribution is *itself *redistribution, and that is a bad thing.

[RTFirefly]

@adaher

But from a policy perspective their interests are pretty much exactly the same.

Not hardly. A family earning $200K a year is still overwhelmingly living off their income, and so will their children. They have some dividend and capital gain income, but it’s a modest bonus, rather than being the main source of income, as it is for genuinely rich people.

My economic interests are not at all aligned with those of the Koch brothers. A transaction tax on transfers of stocks and other financial assets? Taxing capital gains and dividends as regular income? Won’t affect me more than marginally. A graduated tax on inheritances that went up to 99% on assets over $1 billion? Go for it, baby; it won’t affect my son at all.

[adaher]

@Evil_Captor

No it’s not. From Business Insider:

Read more: Charts on US Inequality

To flip that around, 95% of American’s financial wealth is held by the top 20 percent of Americans. THAT’S where the money is. THAT’S who we need to be taxing.

There’s nothing wrong with your facts, you’re just not understanding the point I was making. From a policy perspective, the top 20% and the top 1% have the same interests. They are self-sufficient except for truly public purposes(like roads), so their primary economic interest is low taxes.

By the same interests, I mean the same interests in regards to the way the government behaves towards them. Of course they don’t live the same way and there’s a vast difference in wealth between the 1% and the 20%. But whether you make $100,000/yr or $10,000,000/yr you’re primary problem with the government is still going to be your taxes. You have insurance, you send your kids to private school(or your property taxes already pay for good public schools), your streets are probably safe(due to your local and state taxes), so all you really need from the federal government is to not take a third of your money.

[adaher]

@RTFirefly

Not hardly. A family earning $200K a year is still overwhelmingly living off their income, and so will their children. They have some dividend and capital gain income, but it’s a modest bonus, rather than being the main source of income, as it is for genuinely rich people.

My economic interests are not at all aligned with those of the Koch brothers. A transaction tax on transfers of stocks and other financial assets? Taxing capital gains and dividends as regular income? Won’t affect me more than marginally. A graduated tax on inheritances that went up to 99% on assets over $1 billion? Go for it, baby; it won’t affect my son at all.

Here’s the problem with taxing capital gains as regular income: if you lose, you lose. If you win, you pay half your gains to the federal government. Why invest? The house always wins.

Now I can see trying to tweak the tax code for special cases, like people who pay 15% on all of their income who make millions. An even better approach would be to just have a 20% tax rate for taxable income after $100,000, no deductions. When politicians release their tax returns, they usually pay around 20%, so what are we losing by just making all rich people pay 20%? Many pay less.

I am an investor who is around the media income, and investment taxes are really important to me. The best thing the government ever did was to make investing essentially tax free for me as long as I invest in US companies and hold the stock for at least one year. My capital gains and dividend rate are 0%. So yes, my interest is in keeping investment taxes low or non-existent, so I can save for myself rather than count on government support after the SS trust fund is exhausted.

[BobLibDem]

@adaher

Here’s the problem with taxing capital gains as regular income: if you lose, you lose. If you win, you pay half your gains to the federal government. Why invest? The house always wins.

I disagree on two counts. First, who pays a 50% marginal rate? I don’t think anyone. Second, do you not get to deduct losses? So the “house” can lose, when you deduct your losses and gets a small percentage of your winnings.