What a pile of nonsense. Please cite me where John Kerry has said being rich is bad.
Anyway, Blalron, I think we’ve found what you’re looking for. Some Republicans say Democrats hate the rich. Ergo, their personal wealth is relevant because if Democrats say having money is bad, they are hypocrites for having money. And anything you can do to make your opponents look like hypocrites is a good thing. So in the end, it’s a goofy chain of logic built on falsehoods.
He asked which one required more courage, and generally I think it’s fair to consider helping others more courageous than helping yourself.
Well, to be fair I was not talking about a flat tax either. The question is where do you draw the line? Would you say that there is any context (except possibly a state emergency like a marginally successful invasion) which could justify a 50% tax rate? A 70% tax rate? How high could a rate be and still qualify as fair?
I don’t think there’s a real answer to that. My gut feeling is you should always be able to keep at least a majority of your income. So 49% maximum for the super rich. Is that an arbitrary number? Certainly. But if I had to draw a line in the sand, that’s where I would draw it.
You’re right. I was being too circumspect. I should have said “If one believes that being rich means one should pay a much larger share of one’s income than that income is a share of the economy”. Is that better?
Quite so.
I’m not at all sure this is true. Such actions are certainly more selfless, but morally courageous makes some assumptions about what is moral. Just because someone is other than onesef does not make his needs more moral than ones own.
Fair enough. I would draw the line quite a bit lower (again with exceptions for real emergencies), but at least with a line, I can say that you do not believe the government is entitled to any amount of a person’s income they want. I appreciate that. Very much, actually.
Debating exactly where the line should be is probably outside the scope of this thread.
Well, no, actually. I was being morally nuetral as far as selfish or selfless goes. I happen to think that selfishness is a virtue, but I admit this is a minority opinion.
What I was trying to say was that selflessness is not in and of itself a good arbiter of morality.
OK, what evidence do you think a person should have to provide to support the statement “Republicans/Democrats believe X”?
Seems to me that it should either be:
A poll showing the majority of the party members believe “X”
or
Recognized leaders of the party believe “X”
I gave **Zag ** the easier of the two options. Of course, he could simply realize his mistake and retract his statement, which would actually be the best option of all.
I don’t think anyone’s accuse Kerry himself of saying such a thing. I think the people who say these things are those who attempt to mobilize non-rich voting blocs…African-American activist groups would be one example, Labor Unions another…who say such things. Yet those groups tend to throw their support behind rich Democrats while lamasting Republicans as being uncaring due to their richness.
I think that the Republican tactic of harping on the wealth of the Democratic candidates is a way of trying to neutralize the claim that they [the Republicans] will tend to favor the rich more than the Democrats in their policies. I.e., they can’t win an argument about whether they favor the rich more on the basis of the policies, but they are hoping to neutralize the argument by pointing to the wealth of the Democrats and hoping that the public won’t compare the policies too closely and will just think “a curse on both their Houses” and vote for the one who will keep God in the pledge and ban gay marriages, or whatever. Personally, I think it is a quite effective strategy.
Ironically, I do think that the fact that the Democratic candidates are so wealthy does counteract the other more extreme argument that some on the Right make, that the Democrats are basically socialists who hate the rich. I think it is quite obvious that the Democratic candidates are wealthy enough that they are unlikely, unless they are self-sacrificing to the extreme, to really hit the wealthy too hard. (And, of course, the Dems are also beholden to the wealthy to fund their campaigns.) It is really a matter of degree. It’s not that the Democratic policies favor the poor and middle class over the rich. It is more that the Democratic policies favor the rich less than the Republican policies do.
People don’t say the Republicans are uncaring because they’re rich – they say the Republicans are uncaring because they support uncaring programs that screw the non-rich.
Or, in other words, you don’t have to be poor to be an advocate for the poor.
Of course the greater share of Republicans are not rich. The foot soldiers of the party are mostly working class people who have little interest and even less understanding of the economic policies pursued by their party. What those rank and file Republicans care about is not economics, or even foreign policy, but culture – flag burning, public homosexuality, bad language, prayer in public institutions, abortion, public nudity, sexual deviance, science that denies Biblical inerrantcy, gun control, all that stuff. As long as the smart guys who devise the public relations for the GOP and the power brokers who fund the party create the idea that the GOP stands on the right side, the side of traditional practice, the side opposed to changing social morals, then the rank and file will stand with them despite the fact that the GOP has yet to give them any thing that resembles a roll back of modern, crude, rude profane and irreligious culture and despite the fact that the policies of their party are decreasing their financial security.
This is why Druge publishes photos showing Senator Kerry and Senator Edwards touching each other (something that the social conservative would never think of doing to his life long best friend) and the GOP publicity flacks howl about rude, crude jokes at some Hollywood fund raiser (because no true social conservative would ever tell those jokes in mixed company or laugh at them either), this is why the GOP publicity machine insists on pointing out that Senator Kerry and Senator Edwards are not merely wealthy, they are rich. All this enhances the idea among the those working class Republicans that George Bush supports their ideals and is more like them, despite having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and pursuing an economic policy that increases their financial insecurity and a foreign policy that pretty much guarantees chaos in the world, than John Kerry and John Edwards. Kerry and Edwards are not like them because they laugh at dirty jokes and hobnob with rich Hollywood types and probably don’t really believe in Jesus and don’t want prayer in the schools and don’t think that abortion should be a crime and think that it’s OK for nudity and bad language to be on the TV and OK for people to say the US is not right all the time no matter what it does to who.
It is about the Cultural Wars. Cultural conservatives will support the GOP because of their cultural bias and will ignore the effect of the GOP’s economic and foreign policies on their lives, despite the fact that the GOP has not done one significant thing to advance their cultural agenda in the 30 years that have passed since the Republicans discovered that cultural could be used to separate these people from the political party that consistently advanced their financial interests.
The Demo’s of course fall right into the trap. To show that John Kerry is not a gun control nut they show us pictures of Kerry on a skeet range, but he is using a $3000 shot gun, and a foreign shot gun at that.