This quote comes from Upton Sinclair, and it holds true today. The “something” that I focus on in politics/economics is the reality that for over four decades, wages for the working class have remained virtually stagnant while the wealth created by the working class has supported a skyrocketing of wealth to a very small minority of Americans.
My question has been, why have Democrats been unable (or is it unwilling) to do something about this?
President Clinton left the White House virtually broke (according to statements made by both President Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) and today, they have a net worth, according to most recent estimated. of over $100 Million Dollars.
President Obama and his wife, Michelle, recently left the White House whereupon President Obama began collecting $400,000 speaking fees (more than former presidents receive for a year’s pension) and together, the couple signed a book deal worth a reported $65 Million.
Keep in mind that all former presidents receive a pension of about $200,000 a year, medical care, Secret Service protection, and an allowance to cover the costs of a small office staff.
The economic system in the USA is one where families like the Walton family have a net worth of over $160 Billion while the average employee at one of their Walmart stores makes about $27,000 a year. Our system is one that gives tax relief to men like Jeff Bezos with a net worth of over $160 Billion to persuade him to move his business to an area and pay his employees $25,000 a year.
These same employees at Walmart and Amazon pay taxes to fund the pension funds of former presidents and pay for their security protection, office costs, and clerical salaries of assistants.
This is the same system that pays pro baseball players hundreds of millions of dollars while the farm teams that support it pay their players about $1,000 a month. This is same system pays college football players nothing in wages while the coaches at many of these state owned colleges are the highest paid individuals on the state payroll.
I could go on and on for paragraph after paragraph and the message remains the same. We have a winner take all economy in the USA. It does not matter if you are in sports, business, politics, or even private charities, the winners are the people at the top and they get it all. The rest of us, the losers? We take what they are willing to give us.
Why haven’t Democrats in office attacked this system? I would suggest that it would greatly diminish the changes of going from broke to multimillionaire in a few years for a former president and it would make multi-million dollar book deals and $400,000 speaking fees a thing of the past as well. Those in power to make the changes are making too much money within the system to understand it with clarity and make those changes, or as was once said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
FDR proposed a 100 percent top tax rate. At a time of “grave national danger,” Roosevelt told Congress in April 1942, “no American citizen ought to have a net income, after he has paid his taxes, of more than $25,000 a year.” That would be about $350,000 in today’s dollars.
Given the problems facing this nation and the world, the recent protests in France, the upcoming problems with the UK and Brexit, I see a grave national danger in our not too distant future.
In Sunday’s Globe, I read where a couple from Las Vegas just purchased a Cohasset estate for $12.5 Million Dollars and it will be “another home” for them.
Today in the Globe we learn that the number of homeless people in Massachusetts. is up 14 percent from last year (and over 25% of these people have jobs!),
The wealthy class buys “another home” for $12.5 Million and more than 25% of the homeless in Boston are working full time? Who knows, perhaps the owners of this Cohasset will donate a week’s stay for our next Democratic president for their summer vacation because our Democratic presidents are getting tired of vacationing on the Vineyard?
Someone down voted this post?
I suspect that those who remember Pearl Harbor will take offense at your attempt to compare today’s crisis to the events of that time. We did not suffer a surprise physical attack by united hostile powers last summer.
We do indeed face grave existential threats. Those threats are not remotely similar to what was happening in America when FDR made those statements. The highest Federal income tax rate was 94%, in 1944 and on income over $200,000. That’s $2.5m 2018 dollars. Even FDR, famously persuasive and at the peak of his political power as the WWII mobilization ramped up, was not supported in his request for a 100% rate on incomes over $25,000.
Those whose annual incomes are more than $2.5 m are not going to be touched by a 94% (or 100%) tax rate. They will instead simply instruct their legion of hired money managers to restructure their assets.
The “wealthy class” do not use income to buy their vacation homes. High income tax rates will not affect them in the least.
I encourage you to focus your passion on restoring the gift and estate tax to the levels of 1977 — 70% was the highest rate. The maximum rate today is 40%, and the exemptions are so high that only a tiny handful of people pay anything at all.
I am mystified that you, a self-described Democrat, once again offer a harsh and distorted attack — including snarky cheapshots at Democratic Presidents — while you say nothing about the GOP. Are you happier about Walker’s Point in Maine? Prairie Chapel Ranch in Texas? Rancho del Cielo in California?
I get that you are unhappy about Presidents from the wealthy class vacationing in expensive estates. I don’t understand your frequent and gratuitous attacks on Democrats. In this post, you again focus your ire on Democrats, while ignoring the GOP.
With “friends” like you, the Democratic Party needs no enemies.
Truth be told, it is more than a little silly to complain to the current crop of Republicans to do something about wealth inequality. The only ones to complain to about inaction are Democrats. There’s a remote chance they’ll listen. Especially if you pay them.
I’,m not focused on the Republicans, they accept wide and widening wealth disparity. I’m simply looking to return the Democratic Party back to its roots.
I suggest that the overwhelming majority of our readers are voters.
Commentary like this negatively influences hundreds or thousands of voters for every member of the “current crop” of Democrats that might somehow get something positive from this. Even politicians are people, and when people are attacked they tend to become defensive.
If the point of the diary is to highlight wealth disparity, then its focus on Democrats only hurts. It therefore leaves me with the impression that its point is, instead, to attack Democrats.
Sorry Tom, I’d love to respond your post but since it includes many personal attacks of me, I have to cut my discussion with you off at that point.
I apologize for the personal attack.
I stand by my criticism (and downvote) of the diary, for the reasons I’ve attempted to explain.
I don’t see any personal attacks on you. I see a rather accurate — and none too flattering — categorization of your argument. Indeed, you are no friend of the Democratic party.
Here’s the first corollary to what you quote so approvingly of Upton Sinclair: only the truly naive resent being described as naive…
I downvoted the diary for your usual tired attacks on Democrats and your swipe at Presidents Emeriti who have the gall to make money. I actually wish I could vote by paragraph because I agree with your comments about professional athletes. Tax rates as extreme as you propose are a bit too confiscatory for my tastes.
Not surprised it was you guys. I’m rather used to it. There are some Democrats who support the status quo and some that do not. Thanks for agreeing about professional athletes, but to me, they are just one example of the many I pointed to.
It’s not that Presidents Emeriti have the gall to make money, it’s the money making system that they refuse to address. How the hell does anyone put together $400,000 to hear any Presidents Emeriti speak for one hour? No one in my circle of friend could do so. Where did Goldman Sachs get all that cash to pay for private speeches from a presidential candidate? Again, ain’t nobody in my neighborhood with that kind of cash, which is why, probably, that same candidate visited Wellesley & Provincetown but stayed out of Fall River & Franklin.
Yes, I am criticizing presidents from the Democratic Party and not the Republican Party. The Republican Party has no interest in trying to appeal to the working class and I doubt it ever will. There was a time when many in the Democratic Party did so and a few remain. I am simply looking to increase their number. I can look at recent victories like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and it makes me want to work harder at what I am doing.
For the record, if the tax rate was 100% over $350,000, my hunch is that no one would even try to take $350,001 from a company’s profits and instead., distribute it more equitably among those involved. What a wonderful world that would be.
@ “my hunch is that no one would even try to take $350,001 from a company’s profits and instead., distribute it more equitably among those involved. What a wonderful world that would be.”
Nope, that’s not what would happen. What would happen is that the income above whatever ceiling you propose would disappear, because the income-producing assets would be refactored so that their growth is non-taxable.
For example, you and your neighbors almost certainly have to make taxable income in order to find $400K to put towards a $2M vacation property. The people we’re talking about laugh at the naivete of folks who think a 100% income tax rate would have any effect on that purchase at all. They pull the $400K as a loan from some other portfolio asset. They ensure that the instrument they use to pull those funds specifies that the loan costs include interest at or just above the AFR (Applicable Federal Rate) so that any auditors with sharp pencils don’t hang them up on imputed interest.
That borrowed money is then invested in the new home. Bingo. As soon as appreciation of the new home exceeds the amount of the loan, the loan instrument is cleared. At no time during that process does any taxable gain occur (such gains might happen when the new property is sold, but that’s a different thread).
When a company executive wants to buy an expensive toy (such as a jet), it is often straightforward to create a “independent” leasing company to “manage” the new asset. Such deals usually make money, and no taxes are ever paid on the purchase of the new toy(s).
I share your passion to claw back the wealth that the extremely wealthy have plundered from the rest of us. When seeking tactics and strategy for how to accomplish that, a 100% marginal income tax rate is a non-starter.
Finally, for completeness, neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama even come close to joining the elite ranks of the “extremely wealthy”.
In this thread, you’re just taking cheapshots at your favorite punching bags.
Is there reason we can’t tax ALL sources of revenue, and not just what is narrowly defined as “income”?
The definition of “revenue”, like income, is enormously difficult to define.
Do we really want to tax loan proceeds as if they were income? I’ve long felt that the gain in value of an asset should be taxable even if the asset isn’t sold. On the other hand, are we really going to start taxing retirees on each year’s increase in the value of their paid-off home? We come close to that with property taxes, and even that has been contentious for as long as it’s been done.
I do think that treating “portable property” and investments analogously to how we treat real estate might be a paradigm.
It’s very difficult, though. I think this is one of those areas where if easy answers existed, we would have embraced them decades ago.
Profits are taxed, not revenues. Revenues are gross, profits are net and realized.
Fair enough. My point is that any way by which your financial resources increase should be taxed.
It is fascinating that on one hand, you argue “The Republican Party has no interest in trying to appeal to the working class and I doubt it ever will” and on the other you assert that we Democrats absolutely MUST reach out to disaffected white working-class Trump voters.
Those two assertions are contradictory. In fact, there is reasonably strong evidence that low-information working-class voters (especially white men without college degrees) are a major segment of current GOP supporters.
Demagoguery and lies from the Democrats (“We’ll create a society where unskilled and uneducated workers still make enough money to own homes for their families” or “We’ll create a wonderful world where a 100% tax rate on incomes over $350K solves our economic inequality problem”) are no better than demagoguery and lies from the Trumpists.
I think we have an obligation to tell the truth, even when we don’t like the consequences.
I’m always interested when liberals add some nuts and bolts to their grand plans. When FDR proposed this what was his situation? I think he and his wife were doing well. Eleanor Roosevelt came to her marriage with Franklin with a larger trust fund than he had. At a time when a small-town merchant would consider himself a success if he made $600 per year, Eleanor’s trust fund gave her $7,500 per year. (Franklin’s was $5,000 per year.) FDR might have been jealous of the Vanderbilts, but most were jealous of the Roosevelts.
So you want to confiscate income above 350,000? France tried their millionaire tax under Hollande and rich people started to move to Belgium. Ex Gerard Depardieu.
They lost 10,000 millionaires in 2015 alone. Macron recently changed the focus of taxing the wealthy to real estate, because it can’t be moved. People do move because they want to save on taxes.
How many homes are people allowed? If my two rural homes are worth less than your overpriced (my opinion) Boston area home are we equal? Do you want everyone to only have one? There’s talk on here about taxing the increased value of items which some people had the foresight to buy years ago. I have three Mickey Mantle baseball cards which cost me a nickel when I was a kid which are now worth 300-400 dollars a piece (lowball estimate). I sold a Pete Rose for $75, it cost me a nickel, pretty good ROI. My real estate has increased a great deal in value, in large part because I did my own repairs and improvements. Some went to the beach, I finished my basement and now you want me to pay taxes on that?
I didn’t vote for Trump, think he’s doing a mediocre job, but I don’t see the Democrats putting together an appealing economic message for me. I won’t be a multi-millionaire but my grandsons will be, I’m ok with that.
@ scott12mass:
I wonder how you react to this:
You’re already paying taxes on the improvements you made to your house, because your town assesses property taxes based on the resulting increased valuation. You’ll pay again (unless you lie) in capital gains taxes if you ever sell it.
I remind you that it’s Mr. Trump and the GOP that are limiting your schedule A deduction for whatever interest and taxes you’re paying on your two homes.
I’m much more interested in recouping taxes on the hedge fund shares that Mitt Romney gifted to his children — to the tune of tens of millions of dollars — with no taxes due AT ALL then dinging you for the gains made from your baseball card collection.
Do you understand that one reason why it is so hard to obtain wealth distribution graphs is that in order to be meaningful, they can’t fit on a single page? I’m not concerned about your multi-millionaire progeny.
You are talking about hundreds (baseball cards), hundreds of thousands (two homes) and millions (your grandsons). When we talk about wealth concentration, we’re talking about people whose net worth is valued in BILLIONS. We’re here squabbling about income tax rates on six-figure incomes, and we’re ignoring the reality of our 50 wealthiest people.
What percentage of your net worth did you pay in taxes last year? What portion of Sheldon G. Adelson’s $35.4 billion do you think he payed? Please note that I’m talking about WEALTH, not income.
Take another look at that number:
$ 3 5 , 4 0 0 , 0 0 0, 0 0 0
Mr. Adelson is the wealthiest of the top 50. The top 34 of those people are billionaires. Abigail Johnson, President and CEO of Fidelity, came in second with $16 B. Her father, Edward C. Johnson III, is third on the list with $8 B. So the Johnson family combined holds $24 B.
I think that when Mr. Adelson meets his maker, about $35,395,000,000 from his estate ought to be shared between federal and state estate taxes, where it can ultimately provide increased goods and services for all of us. His progeny will not starve on the $5,000,000 they inherit free of taxes.
The baseball cards (though true) were a comical way to highlight asset appreciation. I wish a relative had appreciated Piccasso early in his career, and if they had I wouldn’t feel guilty keeping the increased value in the family. Why should it go to those who had nothing to do with it’s acquisition?
I haven’t used more than the standard deduction in years so actually income taxes this year will be much better. But I understand the need to pay some into the government coffers. As France is finding out the rich will flee if you take too much. Some of the plans people are talking about on here remind me of the French (right after the revolution). You’re going to take 35 Billion? That just doesn’t seem fair to me.
I believe we need a national sales tax (maybe include base income). Everyone will pay something, the rich who buy more will pay more. But there will be a sense of shared sacrifice necessary to foster a sense that we are in this together.
@ “You’re going to take 35 Billion? ”
You bet. I think we should take that 35 billion from the estate (no living person pays a cent). I think that’s much more “fair” than creating landed gentry in America — the aversion to that was deeply embedded in our cultural DNA for generations until VERY recently.
The problem with any sort of consumption tax (sales tax, VAT, etc) is that isn’t possible for the rich to consume enough to pay their fair share.
How does one “earn” $350,000?
@ “How does one “earn” $350,000?”
A husband and wife each work as senior contributors in a Boston-area pharmaceutical firm. They’ll be earning closer to $500,000 ($250,000 each).
And how does the pharmaceutical company make such a nice profit to pay such a handsome wage to two individuals?
Hint: By way of patents courtesy of the federal government. The same federal government that could require salary guidelines in any company that applies for patents.
Interesting.
So John T. May invents the most marvelous machine ever created for slicing bread. You propose that John T. May has to follow salary guidelines in order to apply for a patent on your invention? Great.
So you get your patent, and then attempt to sell the rights to Big Predatory Corporation of America. Are you suggesting that those salary guidelines are transferred? But BPCA never agreed to them, and because it’s an evil corporate villain, they refuse to agree to them.
What do you think should happen?
Wouldn’t it be easier to just set federal salary guidelines and be done with it?
Yup.
Goo idea.
Yup, why not?
@ handsome wage:
I chose the pharma industry arbitrarily. Those handsome wages not unique to pharma.
It sounds to me as though your issue is with “handsome wages” in general. Since you’ve ruled out supply and demand elsewhere in the thread, what mechanism do you propose for determining compensation of skilled knowledge workers?
Let’s start with this. Sears is in Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.. Sears has obtained permission from a U.S. bankruptcy court to pay out as much as $25.3 million in bonuses to a few Sears executive while laid off employees were denied severance.
Who decides who earns what in this case?
Let’s move onto General Motors:
GM Is Laying Off 14,000 workers as it looks to cut costs but General Motors is not looking to cut the wages of CEO Mary Barra who they give $22 Million in salary.
Who decides this? What makes any of this possible?
Hint: Labor laws, and tax laws.
Gee…..who wrote those laws?
Pro Tip: NOT legislators who were interested in the well being of the workers at Sears and General Motors.
THAT”s what I am talking about.
This is what I was talking about. John T. May seems to believe that the value of one’s labor has to do with its intrinsic worth or something instead of with what someone is willing to pay for it. Just to be clear, I’m talking about economics, not the moral value of labor.
I’ll bet he would ask the question the other way too. Someone puts in an honest day’s work driving a truck. How can he earn so much less than some fat cat who seems to play a lot of golf?
The answer to these questions, I think, is not to declare that the laws of supply and demand are repealed in our new utopia, but to have a robust system of progressive taxation of, say, income and inter-generational transfer of wealth.
Easy answer, tedf, the fat cat playing golf decides who gets paid what in his company and he has enough money to buy lobbyists to effectively run the government that sets labor and tax laws. That’s how. Supply and demand have NOTHING to do with it.
@ Supply and demand have NOTHING to do with it:
So what do you propose?
Political power, equal to that of the ownership class.
Are you familiar with Mariana Mazzucato? Her most recent book The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy might give you some insight on that.
BTW she is a Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London, and Director of UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose .
As it happens, I have read her book. She is right to focus on the ways in which the economy is structured to reward “moving money around” rather than creating useful things or providing useful services, though she acknowledges that sometimes government monopolies and the like serve valuable social purposes (e.g., patents for inventions). But we are talking about wages. If I am an assembly line worker, I am doing useful work, I should take satisfaction from my job, and I am entitled to be treated with the dignity and respect that hard work commands. But I don’t see that anyone is going to pay me more than they can pay someone else for the work. Yes, we have a minimum wage. But for work whose value (in the sense I’ve used the word) is at or near the minimum wage, or less, requiring employers to pay more than the value is just going to speed up the process of offshoring or of replacing labor with capital investments like robots. I read your posts regularly and I have seen no answer in them to this objection.
By the same token, not everyone who receives a high wage is a mere rent-seeker, and I would suggest that in many cases the people who make money by “moving money around” rather than by creating are not paid in wages but through returns on investment etc.
And asI recall you pooh-Pooh the idea that through education and training we might help workers command a higher wage.
It has not made a difference in the past four decades….am I expect it to “trickle down” soon?
Hilarious. You dismiss high-wage workers on this very thread and then claim education and learning hasn’t made a difference in the past four decades.
There are MANY more Massachusetts workers making six-figure incomes today than there were in 1978 (in inflation-adjusted wages). Kendall Square was filled with derelict slums and parking lots then (I used to work in a warehouse in what is now luxury condos on the river). It is now filled with high-rise towers chock-full of highly educated men and women taking down compensation that is comfortably into six figures. Those men and women aren’t all fat-cat golfers and they aren’t all rent-seekers.
Nearly ALL of those workers have at least a masters degree, most have PhDs. Nearly all of those high-wage workers were born after 1978.
Your assertion that education hasn’t made a difference in 40 years is absolutely and hilariously incorrect.
Perhaps you need to expand your horizons beyond the angry white men without college degrees that apparently surround your coffee machine in Franklin.
CEO Pay Has Grown 90 Times Faster than Typical Worker Pay Since 1978.
Tell us, Tom, what education and job skills did these CEO’s get that raised their wealth so much?
I did not say that was the case.
@ I did not say that was the case:
What you did say was this:
You accompanied that with a glowing reference to a text that attributes much of this to rent-seeking behavior, and you’ve made that claim numerous times here.
I think the concise summary of your commentary from tedf is accurate.
Just about every comment on this thread so far buttresses the quote that John T. May used for his headline. Reducing inequality is hard enough without depending on leaders in both parties who benefit from that inequality. Rich politicians hang around with rich donors. They know all the donor’s problems; they have to be briefed on the problems of the rest of us
Do you then support the assertion that a 100% tax on income over $350,000 will solve our economic inequality crisis?
As compared with what? Are you proposing anything–scratch that–have you ever in all your voluminous blogging here on BMG proposed anything that that would “solve our economic inequality crisis”?
The Democratic party is much too full of rich politicians who are chummy with rich people and who see the world like the rich people they are. You seem seem unable or unwilling to comprehend the point John T May is making, Upton Sinclair’s statement grows more and more relevant to this thread.
You asked:
.
I’ve been making concrete proposals about addressing wealth concentration in both comments and diaries for as long as I’ve been at BMG. I’ll enumerate some here for your convenience.
Seven years ago yesterday, I offered “Plundering the 99% … again“, with a concrete proposal in the thread-starter. A few months later I posted “‘Catch and Release’ Taxation. That piece had a marvelous picture of a bass that has since fallen off the post.
Elsewhere on this thread, I proposed this:
I have made frequent proposals along the lines of this comment from last month:
Last September, I offeredthis regarding Massachusetts taxes:
Which of these proposals would “solve the inequality crisis” if they became law in exactly the form you describe them? That’s the standard you apply to John T May’s proposal.
More to the point, which of these proposals have any chance of being pushed seriously by Democrats as long as the party is full of people who are dependent on donations from wealthy people who (despite occasional good intentions) have no interest in “solving inequality”?
Who said anything about “in exactly the form you describe them”? You seem much more eager to attack my proposals than to offer any alternatives.
You asked:
The short answer to your question is “yes”. I gave a longer answer with several proposed directions. Deval Patrick offered a direction in 2013 that would be a step in the right direction, even though I think his proposal was silent on the most important aspect — a significant increase in the gift/estate tax.
The accumulation of enormous wealth across generations is the worst aspect of the current GOP/Trumpist economic policy. The gift and estate tax kept that in check for very long time — which explains why the Trumpists and GOP are so opposed to it.
The proposal from John T. May won’t do anything to help, even if it were somehow made law. Not because the details are wrong, but because the concept doesn’t work. He was quite specific in his proposal — a tax rate of 100%, and an income threshold of $350,000/year. He’s doubled down on those specifics elsewhere in the thread.
I asked if you agree with that, and instead of answering you’ve attacked me and my responses.
I’ll ask again: Do you support the assertion that a 100% tax on income over $350,000 will solve our economic inequality crisis?
Perhaps you and John will agree to embrace the aspect I’ve been offering for years: restore the rate of the top income tax bracket to something in excess of 70%. Today, the top income tax bracket is $510,300/$612,350 and the top income tax rate is 37%.
I’d like to see that rate doubled, to 74% and keep the thresholds the same. Like the ACA, it only works if it’s done with the two other aspects — increase the gift/estate tax and increase capital gains tax rate (both short and long). The reason the other two parts are needed is to make it a little bit harder to avoid taxes by avoiding income — those who avoid the income tax will still pay the other two.
The only way Democrats — or anybody else — will take any of this seriously is if there are alternatives for them to choose from. One of the most effective ways to absolutely destroy ANY chance of getting support is to continue to insult, abuse, and attack the people who make policy.
If you have alternatives to offer, I invite you to do so.
I’ve posted a comment with several links to the proposals I’ve been making here for years. That comment is awaiting moderation.
I asked you about the only specific proposal that the author of the thread-starter has offered. I get that it’s easy and gratifying to attack people and commentary.
I notice that you’ve still not answered my question. Do you support the assertion that a 100% tax on income over $350,000 will solve our economic inequality crisis?
Do YOU propose anything? Have YOU ever in all your voluminous blogging here on BMG proposed anything that would solve our economic inequality crisis?
I am reading Bob Woodward’s book, Fear. The ignorance of economics in this post reminds me of what Woodward reports about the President’s ignorance of the most basic workings of the monetary system and the economy. Let the Democratic Party reject John T. May and all his works. We can’t have two parties living in fantasy land.
(Okay, that was a bit polemical).
Polemical or not, we sometimes need to remind ourselves that we are the grownups in the room.
And when the next Donald Trump sits in the White House…..you can blame?
My “ignorance of economics” is an interesting assertion. I can list a few well known economists who agree with me, ones that I have been reading for the past few years, even been in contact with. Where do you think I draw my opinion?
The credibility of your economic commentary would improve if you demonstrated more awareness of the difference between income and wealth.
Therein, lies the rub. You are less interested in the solutions to the problem than the apportionment of blame upon the Democrats. During earlier contretemps, when it was suggested the blame for Donald Trump lies solely and squarely upon those who voted for Donald Trump, you have counseled that we ‘not blame the voters.’ Miserly, with blame, when that blame is clearly with Republicans, now, when you can contort some argument to twist some measure of blame to rest upon the shoulders of Democrats you are generous in the accusative: parsimony towards the Republicans, profligacy towards the Democrats.
It’s an angry. mean and transparently spiteful argument that the Democrats are responsible for all the worlds ills: I didn’t buy that argument when Newt Gingrich made it twenty years ago and I’m not buying it now when you make it.
That’s your take, as usual. I blame both parties that have crated this system. Both parties. However, as I have posted many times, I do not think that the Republican Party reads Blue Mass Group nor do I think they have even a small number of members who want to do anything about the status quo except make it more in favor of the ownership class.
So here I am. We did not lose Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the others because all the voters there are racist or so on. We lost because a significant number of them are frustrated with an winner take all economy and a forgotten working class.
There are countless solutions to the problem but until we get officials elected into office to listen to the solutions and are willing to try and advance them, what’s the use?
There you go again. You argue both sides of the who-voted-for-Trump argument, whichever seems to to suit the particular exchange you’re in.
If economic suffering was driving those Trump voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and so on, then surely our best strategy is to remind them that their economic suffering is MUCH worse on his watch. But that would mean speaking the truth about GOP and Trumpist economic policy — something that you avoid like the plague.
The plain truth is that the proposals and policies of the Democratic Party have always been FAR better for workers than those of the GOP — and yet you relentlessly hammer Democrats.
If you want elected officials to try and advance solutions, then you must offer some. A 100% tax on incomes over $350,000 is not going get much traction with anybody. It got no traction when FDR proposed it in 1942 and won’t get any traction today.
Sorry Tom, for too many years, I’ve listened to Democratic legislators tell me that while they are screwing me as a working class citizen, the Republicans would screw me even more. The most recent example was the 8% pay cut for retail workers making $35-55K when our legislators cut time and half pay on Sundays to help fund an increase in the state’s minimum wage.
@johntmay: You do not live in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and so on. The “Democratic” legislators on Beacon Hill would probably run as Republicans in the states you mention. Your own feelings about your Massachusetts legislators have very little do with what motivates the voters of those states.
You made the argument that economic suffering was driving those voters to Trumpism. I countered that Trumpism has made life dramatically worse for those voters.
I get that you’re weary of Democratics. If you express that weariness by voting for Trumpists, then you make life even worse for yourself (and the rest of us).
Each vote that we cast is a vote FOR somebody or something. It is not possible to vote against anybody, no matter how offensive they are.
When you or any other working-class voter votes FOR a GOP candidate — and especially a Trumpist candidate — they jump from the frying pan into the fire.
That remains the reality we live in, whether you like it or not.
We don’t even necessarily disagree with either your diagnosis of the problem or your proposed solutions. We just get tired of your constantly ascribing to the Democrats views they do not hold.
I blame both parties that have crated this system. Both parties. However, as I have posted many times, I do not think that the Republican Party reads Blue Mass Group nor do I think they have even a small number of members who want to do anything about the status quo except make it more in favor of the ownership class.
There are countless solutions to the problem but until we get officials elected into office to listen to the solutions and are willing to try and advance them, what’s the use?
Sorry to go off topic here but I am having trouble starting a new post.
Forget about the Democrats being plutocrats. They are really the party of endless war. As I write this two “Democrats ” are standing next to Senator Graham and whining about us leaving Syria. Senators Robert Menendez and Jack Reed desperately want more war.
I see. So you agree with Mr. Trump that doing what Mr. Putin has been demanding for years is good for America.
“The Democrats … really are the party of endless war”?
On the planet where I live, each of the wars we’ve been in since 1975 has been started by a Republican president:
– The illegal contra war (Ronald Reagan)
– The invasion of Grenada (Ronald Reagan)
– The 1990 invasion of Iraq (George H. Bush)
– The invasion of Afghanistan (George W. Bush)
– The 2003 invasion of Iraq (George W. Bush)
How many wars did Jimmy Carter start? Bill Clinton? Barack Obama?
I grant you that Mr. Obama was unsuccessful at getting us out of the quagmire left behind by his predecessor. The entire shitstorm in Syria is the DIRECT result of the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq, brought to us by GOP incorporated (how many billions of dollars did Mr. Cheney, Halliburton, and Blackwater make from that little adventure?)
You apparently want to blame all this on the Democrats. I think you’re woefully incorrect.
You want the troops to stay?
I want decisions about our diplomacy and military to be made by professionals who know what they’re doing.
Not you, not me, and not Donald Trump.