Everyone’s all up in arms about how Willard said he was part of the middle class — “the great middle class, the 80 to 90% of us in this country.” Thing is, he didn’t say he was part of the middle class, he just defined it. Watch the video. (Sorry, I couldn’t find an embed option.)
He’s very clearly saying he’s part of the larger “us,” not that he’s part of the “80 to 90%.” It’s like when, after dinner, I look at my darling children and say, “It’s time for the 50% of us who have school tomorrow to go up to bed.” Us includes my wife and me. The 50% describes the moppets who are in elementary school.
Think I’m being too generous of interpretation? Here’s what he says in the very next sentence(s):
And, what I would do specifically is this: I would say that everybody who is earning $200,000 and less should be able to save their money however they want to and not pay tax on it.
He’s gone and defined specifically what he means by middle class: making under $200K. Romney’s out-of-touch and lacking empathy, but does anybody really believe he would pretend he’s making less than $200,000 (his gaffe about being unemployed, aside)?
Of course not. Fault him for speaking sloppily. Fault him for stiff empathy. But, don’t twist his words.
Instead, flail him senseless for what he did do, which is basically dismiss the extent of poverty in this country. A family with a $200K household income is at the 97.13 percentile (2003 figures from Wickipedia). So, according to Romney, the “great middle class” includes families making less than $15K (15.31 percentile) on the 80% end or less than $10K (8.64%) on the 90% end.
The 2009 federal poverty threshold for a family of four is $22,050.
That Romney may think of himself as middle class is a weird personality tic. That he thinks that families living in poverty are part of the middle class is catastrophically insensitive, with enormous policy implications.
For starters, whether or not their savings will be taxed is almost certainly not the greatest concern for a family living in poverty.
Sometimes I feel that liberals attack conservatives just because they are so. Meanwhile, there are so many REAL reasons to go after them. đŸ™‚
JohnD was right, you start at millionaires and then you will ratchet your way down to find normal people who you want to attack. This is why nobody trusts you guys!
Not too long ago a middle class life in Boston included a vacation home, paying for college for your kids, decent car, nice clothes retirement savings, health care, dentist. All the people who built and owned these triple deckers had that. Do you really think you can buy a house here and live that life today on less than $250,000/year? Do people who do that have aspirations of the super-rich? NO. They’re living in Boston with these lousy schools for God’s sake!
If Democrats were smart, they would have a growth program so that everybody starts to work towards making $200,000/year. But they are not smart! Instead they want to cut everybody down. Dumb!
You just made the best argument on how the middleclass, (or the other 97% of Americans), have already sacrificed enough! The middleclass has already been ratched down with regressive taxes and cuts to programs and the safety net in order to dole out more and more in tax cuts to the wealthy. The middleclass has been the victim of class warfare for decades called trickle down. It translates, “Give us your money and we will take care of you.” Reminicent of serfdom and it hasn’t worked out similarly for the middleclass.
The middleclass now has a choice of requiring their children to be responsible or for the wealthy to begin paying their fair share.
Obama’s great payroll tax cut, that he wants to fight the election of 2012 on, will bring the $30K worker to what $30.5K/year? There is nothing in your playbook that will make a $30K worker a $200K worker. You guys have said nothing to me, besides get on the kneepads to concoct some kind of green company and then get on more kneepads in front of the government.
If you get the money from the rich, you guys will just tax it away, waste $9 on yourselves and your hack buddies for every $1 that gets down to me, and kill the private economy and my current lousy job in the process.
Taxing the wealthy — the wealthy, not the middle class — gets workers (I don’t know about your skills and desires) towards a $200K job in at least the following ways:
– It puts money back into the wallets of consumers who today have no ability to buy ANYTHING. Suppose there is $1B, spread among ten wealthy taxpayers. Consider which scenario is going to cause more goods and services to be bought: (a) ten taxpayers keeping $100M each or (b) ONE THOUSAND taxpayers getting an extra $100K each, or (c) ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND taxpayers getting an extra $10K each.
– It builds roads, rails, water treatment plants, and similar public infrastructure that encourages prospective employers to build new facilities or expand existing ones. That $200K job is more likely to be available to you if there is an office or factory for you to work in. All the workers that build that infrastructure buy goods and services while they build it. That increased demand creates more tax revenue.
– It builds schools, hires faculty, and buys educational material so that a new generation of Americans (or maybe even you, if you’re willing) can acquire the skills needed for those $200K jobs. THOSE workers, teachers, and suppliers earn more revenue, and in turn create more tax revenue.
I agree with you that the payroll tax cut is a terrible idea.
We’ve been encouraging the “private economy” to take money away from everybody and concentrate it in the bank accounts of a handful of people, so that our public infrastructure is in shambles, we have a lousy government, a lousy private economy, lousy schools and you have your “current lousy job”.
Yet you want to continue this failed “strategy”? Insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting the results to change.
What we are doing is insane.
Should be TEN THOUSAND taxpayers getting an extra $100K each.
I see the theory Tom but the actual performance is so inefficient that even if it worked, the government would be spending a million dollars to get $10K down to me.
>>>- It puts money back into the wallets of consumers who today have no ability to buy ANYTHING.
— they will buy stuff from China
>>>>- It builds roads, rails, water treatment plants, and similar public infrastructure that encourages prospective employers to build new facilities or expand existing ones.
— they should be doing this according to price signals from the market, not according to government plans which are mostly wrong and mostly wasted by getting spread to 100 senators.
>>>>>>> – It builds schools, hires faculty, and buys educational material so that a new generation of Americans (or maybe even you, if you’re willing) can acquire the skills needed for those $200K jobs.
—– this is a tougher one, but I’m sticking to the idea that most job training during times of growth is done on the job, again through price signals sent in the market. Taking four years to do what could be done on the job in six months is wasteful and also likely to lead to misdirection.
The only decent justification of redistribution is to save people from starving. Real achievement doesn’t come that way.
Re-building America’s infrastructure, America’s schools, healthcare system, economy and paying for the 2 wars, national security, and caring for our wounded warriors is patriotic – not waste.
The tax dollars spent to stimulate the economy on these middleclass workers, the labor unions, the teachers, nurses, social workers, soldiers, police, firefighters…are the true heroes who are building, maintaining and protecting our country. They spend their salaries and it ends up back in the pockets of the wealthy and in this cycle we all have better roads, bridges, education, environment, security, etc., and a growing economy, making our country great.
Do you know? Do you have any idea?
I guess we’re inclined to think of “middle class” as a sociological or economic term, e.g,, people employed in certain roles, or earning a certain quantity of money. Here in the reality-based world, that’s how we like to use the phrase. That’s how we expect everyone uses the term — or should.
In conservative political discourse, the term seems to mean something else entirely. If Mr. Romney has mischaracterized himself using that dialect, we might expect him to be contradicted by other Republican candidates. Has he been? I doubt it.
The Republicans, after all, push a narrative of the “elites” vs. “us”. Within that narrative, “middle class” could just be another term for “us”. To them, millionaire members of the middle class are just non-elite people who have achieved their aspirations through discipline and hard-work.
I think you’re absolutely correct.
We saw this same strategy employed by Spiro Agnew (in the service of Richard Nixon), coining his phrase “Silent Majority” to mean “ignorant white racist hard-hat thugs”. The phrase was, in fact, an insult to the American majority then, just as today’s equivalent is an insult to the true American “middle class” of today.
Mitt Romney et al use “middle class” to mean ignorant, prejudiced, superstitious, sexist and racist thugs. Of course they deny this. They point to meaningless tokens like Clarence Thomas and Sarah Palin (“some of my best friends are black”) in hopes of distracting us from the fundamental moral bankruptcy this movement assumes and panders to.
Just as bad pornography insults its audience by the assumptions about its audience that its content telegraphs, so too does the GOP smear machine insult its audience.
Yes, there was plenty of thuggery in support of the Vietnam War and in opposition to integration, but Nixon did get re-elected to continue the war. I can’t believe the thug bloc is larger than the non-thug vote.
Romney and thuggery constitute a curious mix as thuggery tends to mess up one’s hair.
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What is at work though is an appeal to tribalism — a sort of “United We Stand” by invitation only.
Spiro Agnew and the Nixon campaign quite intentionally used the thugs — such as hard-hats — to provoke the mostly-peaceful anti-war demonstrations into violence. The not-so-veiled messages to police departments were the same.
The political strategy was to fill the media with stories and images of violent protests, and pander to the fear (and racism and so on) of the “silent majority” — “Re-elect Richard Nixon, protect America, protect your homes”. This tactic of using fear, lies, and manufactured crises to coerce votes was effective for the GOP in 1972 and has been since.
I enthusiastically agree with you about the appeal to tribalism, it is all part of the same nauseating stew.
Yes, I’d forgotten that rather unsavory part.