What Gesture said. When running for office or trying to drum up support for a position, it works better to attack the other guy than to offer reasons why your own position is superior. And it works better to try associating the other guy with something that your audience dislikes than to provide a logical reason for opposing their position, specifically since that lets you avoid mentioning the more unpleasant aspects of your own position.
For instance:
The liberals are wrong about wanting universal health care because the advantages gained by having competitive forces in our market-driven system outweigh the advantages of providing health care for the poor in a universal coverage system.
just doesn’t rally the troops the that this does:
The liberals want universal health care coverage, and that’s obviously communist, so they must be wrong.
So, is respect for the fact that others might have religious beliefs different from your own now considered to be anti-religious? At any rate, as a Jew (admittedly, an atheistic one), I can assure you that I still get many “Merry Christmas” wishes every year. (I seldom bother to correct people … I know they mean well and I take it in the spirit it was intended. However, I do appreciate when people make an effort to acknowledge the diversity of different religious beliefs and I do tend to expect it a little more when the event is more official. For example, when I was in grad school, I always appreciated it that our department officially called what they had a “pre-holiday party” even though it was more commonly referred to as “the Christmas party” by most including myself.)
Wrong, after reading about how Communism and the radical left were stopped from gaining a strong following in the USA, the reality is that Liberalism defused class warfare. I think that the efforts to claim that even the defusing should be called “class warfare” are really dumb.
Good point, GIGObuster. After the recent corporate scandals, The American Prospect had a piece arguing just that…that it has been the job of liberals to save capitalism from itself, i.e., to curb capitalism’s excesses to the point where it keeps the push for a more radical revolution marginalized.
Nyet, comrade. When various liberal candidates decry ‘tax cuts for the rich’, they are specifically and disingenuously appealing to low income folks. (And the not-to-bright among the middle class!) But you aren’t denying the ‘redistribution of wealth’ charges, are you?
Actually, the assertion that Sociology (sometimes overtly, sometimes tacitly) makes about what is an “utter impossibility” is a society that is not stratified by power. Marxism – not seriously taught as a theory in most Political Science or Economics departments in the US, or so I am led to believe – is a central part of theoretical canon within sociology.
It doesn’t occupy the place of a sacred cow, though. In most sociology departments, incoming students are introduced to marxist theory and therefore the premise that all social structures and relationships can be understood according to relationships of power that are defined in terms of ownership & control of the means of production. Then in the chapters that follow they are exposed to Max Weber and other theorists and thereby the notion that power stratification need not depend on material considerations at all – power can be vested in social positions and their reputation, or manifested in control of the mechanisms of overt violence for that matter, and therefore marxism is generally portrayed by the discipline of sociology as interesting but unduly limited in scope. But what survives and persists throughout most sociological theory is the notion that all social structures and relationship patterns are about power and that all societies are stratified by power and the struggle to obtain / maintain it.
Within that framework, “radical” (a term that I consider to be pretentious on their part) perspectives and their adherents tend to be overtly critical of the propriety and fairness of existing distributions of power and the social structures through which it is weilded and maintained, while “conservative” perspectives tend to operate from an unquestioning or disinterested position with regards to such issues, i.e., insofar as societies are and always will be stratified by power this and these and those are the ways in which power is manifested and maintained and it is neither useful nor proper for sociology to attempt to assess whether these fixtures and methods are proper or fair.
There is nothing known as “liberal” sociology, but the general attitude of people who style themselves politically as “liberals” is that power stratification is unnecessary or at least that less of it is necessary than we currently experience. They tend to believe that there is, or might be, some way in which good ideas would win out over bad ideas after being aired in a marketplace of ideas where the social power of the person speaking them or favoring them would not be a determining factor.
Conservative critics of liberals tend to emphasize liberal attempts to ameliorate or oppose the concentration of power that occurs as a consequence of economic wealth, and to portray other forms of liberal opposition to concentrated power as subsidiaries of that (i.e., liberals protesting increases in police power are perceived as taking this position because the police are civil defenders of the capitalist state, rather than because of police power in and of itself).
The stance of liberals by and large is not informed by economically-centered theory of any sort, though. The point of origin for most liberals is “fairness”, the belief that it should be possible to stop power stratification from giving any party unfair advantages over others such that outcomes are due to who holds the social power rather than the quality of the individual’s work or ideas or other efforts. Both the best of liberal ideas (eliminating property ownership, sex and race as reasons for restricting the vote to a subset of adults) and the silliest (arguing against grades in school so everyone would have equal opportunity to get hired after graduation) can be traced back to this desire for fairness.
In truth, there is no fully-formed and fully-articulated “liberal social theory” in the sense of a blueprint or utopian vision of what a “totally fair” society would look like. As a consequence, there is a trend among marxist-socialist types to occasionally proclaim that if liberals thought out their issues to their final conclusions liberals would all be socialists. On the other hand, they also quite often condemn liberals as collaborators and apologists who keep the evil capitalist system running, and as so many others have said, liberals generally reject socialist goals and views and do not consider themselves to be kin to socialists at all.
Well, obviously when they speak out against tax cuts that favor the rich, they’re appealing to the low income and middle income people. But I don’t see why it’s dishonest. Do you have any examples of candidates specifically lying about the amount of a specific tax cut that’s going to a specific group?
As to redistributing wealth, the majority of government spending is created for the specific purpose of handing wealth to the rich, and conservatives are constantly trying to add more. For instance, look at the recent energy bill and agriculture handouts. So the progressive income tax helps balance out government action by giving a minor advantage back to the poor and middle class. It also balances out the regressive sales taxes at the state level.
>When various liberal candidates decry ‘tax cuts for the rich’, they are specifically and disingenuously appealing to low income folks.
Do you deny that there have been tax cuts for the rich under Republican leadership, or just disagree with the notion of encouraging poor people to vote based on their own self-interest? Why should poor people be FOR tax cuts for the rich, which result in either higher taxes for themselves or roll back of government services?
What is disingenuous about that?
Wrapped up in Republican rhetoric is the notion that poor people don’t have the right to determine the course of their own government. Hence the propoganda to make them fear and hate government. “Get government off your back!” they cry. Why? So businesses can roll right over them? Lower wages, roll back safety regulations, get rid of health insurance?
That is disingenuous.
Oops, I guess my belief in representative democracy rather than a plutocracy is betraying my communist leanings.
(just in case it’s not obvious, I’m only quoting eli the fanatic to give myself a launching point; my post is intended as a participation in the general discussion here, not just as an aside to eli)
One can be harshly critical of the workings of the unfettered & unmodified market economy without embracing socialism, communism, or marxism.
I know some born-again fundamentalist Christians who rant about the vacuity and vapidity of modern commercial culture. I find myself substantially in agreement with them, but despite that fact I have yet to embrace the belief that inviting Jesus of Nazareth into my cardiovascular cavity and believing the Bible to be the directly dictated verbatim word of Yahweh the One God is going to fix any of that.
Taxes exist because of the belief that the market economy will not meet people’s needs properly if left strictly alone. Laws against monopolies and other specified business practices also work to ameliorate and cushion the functioning of the market economy. Indeed, it is possible that even Brutus would not like it if the only highways built and maintained were those paid for by individuals and corporations who desired roads there and spent their own money putting them there and keeping them paved. Or if the only police or military forces in existence were privately employed by those desiring police protection from domestic or foreign threats.
Once we’ve established that, the rest is just a matter of how much, and how to spend it.
>There have been tax cuts for all sorts of people, from rich to poor. It is (at best) scaremongering to call the tax cuts ‘for the rich’.
There’s disingenuine-ness for you. Under our Republican governer, there have been tax cuts for the rich. These tax cuts caused budget shortfalls resulting in increased property taxes for me, as well as frozen wages, which (considering the increase in health benefit costs and the cost of living) amounts to a pay cut. I think, typical of Republican tax “relief” is just like this. It costs me, to make the rich richer. This is also Redistribution of Wealth. Take my money and give it to the rich.
The point remains: considering that class warfare is silly.
Conservatives can make the argument that the rich should not be taxed at a higher rate than the poor and middle class, but they don’t do that, better to bring fear. And this is ignoring that the wealthy get to benefit the most by the taxes they pay. Highway construction would be affected. The military would dwindle to nothing and there would not be the markets that military intervention does open. (Not thinking here of Iraq in particular but of Japan in the 19th century)
Why use “class warfare” to describe something that does not reach the level of violence of a war in the US? The use of that term is fear mongering indeed, but it is not coming from the liberals.
Well, I guess this is true if by “scaremongering” you mean doing in-depth analyses of who gets what under the tax cuts and then reporting those to the public, as organizations such as CTJ (Citizens for Tax Justice) do. I can understand how you conservatives would hate that sort of shit since it actually gives the whole story, unlike Bush’s deceptive appeals to “averages” to make his tax cuts sound like they give the average-Joe more than they really do. (As has been pointed out, if you get Bill Gates and 50 homeless people in a room, then on average, the people in the room are billionaires.)
I believe the numbers that CTJ has documented is something on the order of 40% of the money from the Bush tax cuts going to the top 1%. The counterargument that they pay almost that share in taxes is true only if you consider only federal income taxes, thus excluding federal payroll taxes and all the primarily-regressive state taxes people pay.
One also has to realize that when you are cutting taxes and not cutting spending but just running deficits, the money has to come from somewhere. In part, it is probably coming indirectly from increases in state taxes which tend to offset much of the federal tax cuts for the poor and middle class but not for the rich. In part, it is coming from inevitable rises in taxes down the road (or draconian cuts in services). Unless these taxes are raised primarily from the rich who have enjoyed the cuts, the net effect will be a transfer of money from the poor and middle class to the rich.
No, it’s perfectly accurate, and the administration has been boldly deceptive with their abuse of people’s misunderstanding of how averages work.
What’s misleading is not, in the same breath, noting that any across the board tax cut will disproportionately benefit the rich, simply because they pay most of the taxes to begin with. Getting a tax cut of any appreciable size that DOESN’T fall mostly on the rich is actually fairly hard.
Here are their latest numbers showing it is about 30% in the current year, rising to near 40% or over 50% by 2010, depending on whether or not the current “sunsets” in the tax provisions are kept in place or not. (With the higher number being if the sunsets are kept in place.)
Why should taxes be “fair” if they amount to the same “share” of total income? That isn’t a meaningful comparison of equality along ANY metric.
But you’re right. Cutting taxes today without cutting spending today is simply making a tax raise in the future more inevitable. It’s as if Bush was walking into our house, ordering a whole bunch of stuff on our credit cards, and then saying that he’d done us a big favor since he did take any money from our pockets. ANYONE can pretend to be for a lower tax burden with such tomfoolery.
I tried not to breathe between my sentence “I believe the numbers …” and “The counterargument that …”
I lost you. My point is that some would say, “Well, yes, the richest 1% are getting 40% of the tax cut but that is because they are paying nearly a 40% of the total taxes.” My point is that this latter statement is only true if you look just at the share of federal personal income tax paid (with the actual most recent numbers being that the top 1% paid 37.4% of them in 2000 and 33.9% in 2001).
What Bush and the treasury department like to point out is that the federal income tax was cut slightly progressively (at least in the 1st round of tax cuts) in the sense that the poor saw a bigger percentage decrease in their federal income tax burden then the wealthy. However, besides ignoring the estate tax cut (and also I think prior to this latest round with the dividends tax cut), this only illustrates that it is possible to cut one of the most progressive taxes a bit progressively and still make the overall tax burden that people face more regressive. To give an example that is probably pretty close to the reality faced by some fairly well-off and some fairly lower or lower-middle class taxpayer, say,
Joe Working Man pays 10% of his taxes through the federal income tax and 90% through other taxes. If you cut his federal income tax by 15% then his total tax burden is reduced by 1.5%.
Ralph Executive pays 90% of his taxes through the federal income tax and 10% through other taxes. If you cut his federal income tax by 10% then his total tax burden is reduced by 9%.
Hence, you have a tax cut that, while cutting the federal income tax by a larger percentage for the poor than the wealthy, has cut the total tax burden much more in percentage terms (and way way more in dollar terms, of course) for the wealthy than poor. You are thus left with a less progressive tax structure overall.
The tax cuts in Minnesota were for all three brackets. The middle bracket recieved the largest perentage reduction (from 8% to 7.25%). The top and bottom recieved the same .5% reduction. Why would you refer to the tax relief in Minnesota as ‘for the Rich’?
Well, I won’t presume to speak for eli in exactly what he was saying, but his basic point that the income tax cuts in Minnesota will go in large part to upper incomes whereas the increases in property taxes that occur (as will as other effects) will be more broadly felt is indeed borne out by the CTJ analysis of Minnesota state and local taxes. What that analysis shows is that:
(1) The tax structure in Minnesota in 2002 was fairly flat…making it more progressive than many other states…with the bottom 20% paying 10.5% of their income in taxes and the top 1% paying 9.3% in taxes. [If you include the effects of the federal tax deduction one can take for state taxes, then the result is more regressive, with the bottom 20% still paying 10.5% of their income in state and local taxes while the top 1% pay just 6.4%. However, admittedly you only want to count this deduction once when considering the state/ local and federal tax structure…so you can assign it to the state/local level or the federal level but not both.]
(2) The distribution of taxes paid by the bottom 20% (in terms of percent of total income) is:
Sales and excise taxes - 6.9%
Property taxes - 3.2%
Income taxes - 0.4%
For the next 20%, it is:
Sales and excise taxes - 5.1%
Property taxes - 2.3%
Income taxes - 2.5%
For the top 1%, it is:
Sales and excise taxes - 1.0%
Property taxes - 1.6%
Income taxes - 6.8%
So, what you see is that even if income taxes are cut in a fairly “flat manner”, the net effect will be to reduce the tax burden of the lowest 20% by almost nothing, to cut the tax burden of the next 20% by more but still not that much, and to cut the tax burden of the top 1% by the largest amount (in terms of either percentage of total income or percentage of total state/local tax burden). This is much the same as the story I told about the federal income tax cuts.
Hope that helps you understand why eli (I believe correctly) considers a cut in income taxes while property taxes are forced up and wages are frozen to result in a net transfer of wealth upward.
