They don’t hate rich guys, because they don’t know them and assume they worked hard for their money, just like they do: they hate professionals, like doctors, lawyers, managers, because they make more money then they do, ordering them around.
They want to be adressed in terms of the economy: they want jobs that give a full time wage and a family mans dignity.
The Dems have catered to the poor (some of them undeserving, sometimes infuriatingly so) on the dime of the middle class that is just a notch above the poor.
Sewing dissension between the lower classes, and encouraging them to hate one another is one of the oldest tricks in the ruling classes’ book.
Double points for believing that rich guys ‘worked hard’ for their money and what a Trump, Vanderbilt, Frick or Gates did compares with crawling down a mine-tunnel for a mile on one’s knees and hitting rock for 8 hours.
The idea that some people are undeserving is the problem. Either it’s the relatively small instances of welfare fraud, which we do actually try to stop, or it’s just them making a value judgment that someone else isn’t worthy of help.
And the idea that it’s on the dime of the working class is untrue. They do not pay the bulk of taxes. It’s true that the rich often do things to avoid taxes, but not even that results in the burden mostly being held by the working class.
Plus, well, it’s the Democrats who advocate keeping working and middle class taxes low. It’s Republicans that reduce taxes on the rich which increases the tax burden on everyone else.
This part is factually true (not saying the rest isn’t, but it 's far more debatable). According to IRS data distilled at Tax Foundation.org, the top 1% of earners in the US account for 19% of all income earned, but 38% of all taxes paid. The top 5% account for 34% of all income but 58% of all taxes. If we define middle class as the top 10-50% of earners, they account for 43% of all income and only 28% of all taxes. The bottom 50% account for 11% of income earned and 3% of all taxes paid.
The latter sure. But the former is harder to work out. Given that the rich would own a disproportionate number of corporate employers, they would indirectly pay a higher proportion of payroll tax than the average joe. But then a large number of corporate employers are institutionally owned, so… who knows?
Rich guys control the media and the political system.
They use their control of the political system to make sure the tax system favors rich people.
They use their control of the media to direct attention away from this. One common tactic is to tell middle class people that poor people caused all their problems. Middle class people who are focusing their anger at poor people aren’t focusing their anger at rich people.
I have not yet seen an accounting/calculation of tax burdens that deals with reality. These figures certainly do not.
It’s deceptive to talk about the percentage of taxes paid in this way. There are so many aspects of taxes and money and cost of living and costs of making money involved, that there has to be a PHILOSOPHICAL component assumed, before any short answer can be accepted.
Things to consider include, but are not limited to:
the wealthy people USE MORE RESOURCES than the poor. Therefore for them to pay only an identical equal share of the costs of existence, is unfair.
taking ten percent of a person’s income who is at poverty level, or even middle class level, is a LOT more damaging to their lives than taking the same percentage from a much wealthier person, because there is a finite amount of wealth required for existence, that does not change significantly with income. In other words, it takes no more food to feed a rich person of a given weight and age, that it does to feed a poor person of the same stature.
Thus, if taxes were based on how much life-pain the person suffers from paying them, the tax rate on the wealthy would have to be over 95% in many cases, to even BEGIN to make them suffer to the degree that the middle class does, paying at a 10% rate.
because capitalism is mismanaged pretty much everywhere, people who exchange labor for sustenance, are ALWAYS underpaid for their work. Always. Because in order to supply an hour of labor to someone else, a person must live for almost two decades on someone else’s dime, before they can begin to do the work; they have to continue to pay all their own expenses while working; their cost of living does NOT fall off, when they stop working (and stop getting paid). But employers only pay a tiny PART of what it costs to have a capable person perform the work, and only for the duration of the work itself. Why should employers, on top of all those insane bargains, have to pay LESS to fund the government?
No, the bottom-feeders pay all the taxes. Those at the top have the power to hold the consumers to prices that covers their taxes, too.
Example: My dentist needs $100 an hour to live on and make his sailboat payments and keep his daughters in an eastern boarding school. If he charges me $100, he gets to keep only $50 of that after his taxes. So he charges me $200, pays $100 in tax, and makes the $100 he needs to support his lifestyle. In order to pay the $200, I needed to make $250 and pay my own taxes. But I have no power to adjust the prices in my economy. Everybody just keeps passing down their taxes until I pay theirs for them, in addition to my own, and I have nobody to pass it down to. I made $250, paid my taxss, and paid the dentist’s taxes too.
No, there does not. The rich pay a high proportion of all tax.
You can give your views about whether they should pay more, whether it’s fair that they pay what they do, whether they take more than they give, and on and on and on. And I’d probably agree with your views if you gave them.
But the rich pay a high proportion of all tax. Accept this factual proposition and move on. I’m on the left myself but time after time I see this debate bog down because people on the left try to argue that black is white on this issue, rather than admit the plain facts.
There are plenty of reasons, pragmatic and philosophical, as to why the rich should pay a high proportion of all tax. You do not need to engage in a futile and credibility-sapping argument about whether the rich pay a high proportion of all tax, and doing so just distracts from the main issue.
I did not vote for Trump but I think the article analysis was spot on for many, many things. The Democrats have made a lot of boneheaded moves that painted them into this awful corner they find themselves in.
What implications do you find uncomfortable?
I doubt progressives are listening, they are too busy making fun of Trump, going on “Women’s” Marches, wearing pussey hats etc etc. They missed the 30 million women who marched into a voting booth and voted for him.
Reading about the troubles of the working class, makes one think maybe Trump had a point with his “carnage” comment.
I’d be more convinced that Trump was some tribune of the working class* if it was clear that he’d actually won the working class vote. He did better than previous Republican candidates, but that’s not the same as winning it.
*The article has an incorrect headline. It might not be the author’s fault (they often don’t write the headline), but the article is about the white working class, whereas the headline promises a look at “the U.S. working class.” Not the same thing at all.