What was all that about the job-creators having a right to the reward for taking risks? When did that stop including taking responsibility for losses, too?
Who the fuck cares?
Look, the point wasn’t whether the things I mentioned were good or bad; the point was whether the economic interests of a household making $200K a year aligned with those of people like the Kochs.
The answer is NO. That’s the sum total of the relevance of cap gains taxation to this thread.
Well, that kinda goes without saying, doesn’t it?
Must be nice to be the guy whose income is subsidized by the people who work every day and whose paychecks are taxed as regular income.
I guess the rest of us are just suckers.
Anyway, back to the topic, my simplified take is this:
- The Dems do just fine in Presidential election years.
- Their problem is in midterms and other off-year elections.
- Winning the elections in (2) is a matter of getting your base to turn out.
- You do that by (a) firing up the base and giving them a reason to vote, volunteer, and contribute money, and (b) GOTV.
A stronger progressive platform could certainly help with 4a. I think it’s a real problem when voters aren’t sure that the Dems are on their side, even if they believe the GOP is clearly not.
It doesn’t have to be anything particularly radical (“more, better-paying jobs” has a nice ring to it, IMHO) but it’s got to address the issues that people are dealing with.
I mostly agree with what you said, but the problem is that the motivating issues in blue states are different than the motivating issues in purple states. On no issue is this more clear than Obamacare: a good number of moderates are unhappy about the law, and are willing to entertain repealing it. There’s also liberals who are unhappy that it doesn’t go far enough.
The problem is that good Democratic candidates running in more blue areas might talk about further expansion of Obamacare, which would be great in those areas. The problem is that message bleeds over to purple states, where that’s just not a good message at all.
And let’s also keep in mind that the Democratic candidates that do, and have done, quite well with the type of voter we’re talking about here are typically in the Bill Clinton triangulation mold – most certainly not the Alan Grayson sort of mold.
But in the latter and only in the latter case your primary problem is capital-gains tax and inheritance tax, not income tax – unless you have much bigger problems with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Always.
And emphasize “better-paying” over “more.” As Robert Reich writes in Beyond Outrage:
I agree, Democrats need to get very, very interested in raising wages for middle class jobs and creating more of them. But they are not, beyond meaningless lip service. I can’t IMAGINE the middle class voter would object to Democratic elected leaders doing all they can to take positive steps to help the middle class, but all they do is yammer, they don’t even attempt to do anything.
I wonder why not?
Actually, I addressed why my interetss align with the Kochs on this issue. Taxing capital gains as regular income would make it a lot harder for me to make money investing.
Work income is risk-free. Investing is not. That alone is why investments should be taxed less. The other reason is that poorer people need to save and invest more than richer people. And the tax system should be friendly to saving.
You know the answer to that, it’s in the OP: Because they need campaign contributions from deep-pocket donors.
Good. Lack of investment is not the problem with the American economy. That’s supply-side thinking, and we’ve had much more than enough of that!
I thought about trying to respond, but yanno? The views behind this post are why the Republicans were beaten so comprehensively in 2012 that some of them choose not even to remember it.
The democrats need to focus their efforts on turning out voters who agree with them, not on converting white conservative voters.
You also have to consider that white conservative voters are going to create a big division within the democratic party which tries to be inclusive towards those considered on the fringes of the socioeconomic system. The democratic coalition used to have both minorities and conservative whites, but that coalition broke down in the 60s. Many conservative republicans are strongly attached to the sense of moral superiority they feel over non-whites and the poor. Any coalition that requires those groups to work together will fail eventually.
I say we continue letting the GOP implode, driving away all but the base and making the party more and more radical in the process.
Unmarried women alone make up about 25-30% of the electorate, they prefer democrats 2-1. Get them to vote instead of trying to convince Jethro to put aside his xenophobia long enough to listen to an economics lecture about the minimum wage.
Getting people to vote requires doing the opposite of what the GOP is doing. Make election day a paid national holiday. Have mandatory voter registration. Offer transportation to/from the polls. Make absentee voting easier. Have more early voting.
Also not all whites are the same. The whites in Vermont vote democrat about 2-1. The whites in Mississippi vote republican about 9-1.
Also that article implies that if you just explain to voters how democrats have their economic interests at heart they will switch party affiliation is what people like George Lakoff have been trying to get away from. You need a narrative and storyline and like it or not the GOP have an appealing one.
The Dems can win white working-class voters without converting them; just offer them everything they want on the economic side and downplay the social side – they’re “conservative” on the latter but not the former.
No, the point of the article is that explaining ain’t enough, you actually have to do things in their economic interests that Dems have not been doing since LBJ.
1)*Awwwwwwwwww. *
2) You’re not exactly a typical upper middle class person. So if your interests are aligned with the Kochs, that’s nice but meaningless.
Because nobody ever gets fired or laid off.
Sure, investment has risks. So what? We don’t need you to invest. We, from a public policy standpoint, don’t care whether you invest or not, so why should we subsidize it? If you want to take on the risk, good for you. But that’s strictly your business. Poker playing has risks too, but we don’t subsidize that either.
The tax system can be - and is already - friendly to poorer people by largely exempting them from taxation.
Besides, the best way to get poorer people to save? Pay them enough for their labor so they’ve got some money left over that they can save.
OK, BrainGlutton, terminology is getting to be a problem here. Why are you saying “white working class voters” when the topic in general has been “white middle class voters”? I think SOME segments of the white middle class can be lured away from the Republican fold by a Democratic Party that actually tries to promote their economic interests, but others, specifically, the lower middle class will be much harder. That’s because when you are just a rung above the homeless, what you have to make yourself feel like a worthwhile person is your morality, your beliefs about what is right and just. And that’s where the Republicans have been fiendishly clever, tying in opposition to gay marriage and abortion rights to middle class morality, with the religious establishment playing right along with them. You are NOT gonna be able to cull these people from the Republican Party by working in their economic interests, because their economic status does not define who they are, to their minds. It’s their morality that defines who they are.
Because white working-class voters are the topic of this thread, see OP and thread title.
And again, what is the middle class’s economic interest? Low taxes. Do you think middle class families are actually sitting around the table thinking, “Ya know, if only the government would take more money from us and give it back to us with strings attached.”
An abundance of high-income jobs. Investment in public infrastructure, material and otherwise, that they use and need. Survival as a class and an end to conditions that threaten that survival, for which taxes are not to blame.
And the economic interest of the working class is very similar.