[hrothgar]

Great editorial in the times today

http://www.nytimes.c...r=1&ref=opinion

[Winstonm]

The fantasy of trickle-down economics lives on, while reality is yellow-colored and doesn't smell too good.

[y66]

The zombie economics propaganda and legislative machinery is something to behold and reckon with. Even scarier is how many white blue collar voters support these ideas: 55 percent of white voters making less than $50,000 per year and 58 percent of white voters without a four-year college degree according to an AP pre-2010 election poll.

[PassedOut]

At one time I might have fallen naturally into the republican camp: I've been in business all my life. I strongly believe in personal responsibility and in the efficiency of the free market. I don't believe that the government can solve every problem.

But the utter lunacy of the policies of the republican leaders today makes it impossible for a responsible person to vote republican. Pretty much the whole appeal that the republicans make today is, "There really is a free lunch, and you can have it if you vote for us." And what is really sad is that so many suckers in the US fall for that nonsense.

[kenberg]

y66, on 2010-December-30, 07:57, said:

Even scarier is how many white blue collar voters support these ideas: 55 percent of white voters making less than $50,000 per year and 58 percent of white voters without a four-year college degree according to an AP pre-2010 election poll.

This would be an excellent topic for research into how people make choices. For example, in the recent stuff about tax rates, both Republicans and Democrats wanted to keep the Bush cuts in place for low and middle income people, but Republicans wanted to keep the rates low for everyone. Looking only at rational self-interest, it's hard to see why a guy making 50K a year would think that it is really important for someone making 500K a year to have a low tax burden.

There are two extreme explanations:
1. People making 50K a year spent their evenings digesting economic treatises and after holding extended seminar discussions came to believe that on balance the argument for low taxes as an economic incentive was the correct one.
2. People making 50K a year are out of touch with reality.

I suspect that both of these guesses are wrong. A guy making 50K a year, even w/o a family, is by necessity dealing with reality everyday, and he has little time or interest for the WSJ.

So what is it? I think people make a lot of their choices on a "Who do you trust" basis. And while they do not trust Republicans, they trust Democrats even less. It was not always this way, and it would be of great interest just as a research question, but also of great use as a practical matter, to determine the cause of the shift. It would take some work.

Just to show how I am thinking, let me borrow from a post of Adam's a while back. Adam was taking Republicans to task for asserting a number of views, one of them being about abstinence education (for sex). Adam said, and I believe he is correct, that abstinence education is not very effective in reducing the rate of teen pregnancies. OK, but now move into the head of your Basic Joe with a teenage daughter Susie. Susie is not an out of control kid but she is attractive and being pestered by the boys. Joe would just as soon his daughter did not spend time in school learning how to put a condom on a banana. He wants to keep her out of the back seat of cars, he believes she pays at least some attention to what he says, and he doesn't believe that a lot of jabber in schools about safe sex is helping his cause. Yes, some girls are out of control and need instruction about safe sex, but his daughter isn't one of them and he is not going to be voting for any liberal schmuck who says that she is.

There are many variants of this, and if liberals want Joe's vote then they had better figure out how to deal with it.

[barmar]

I think Ken has it right. The problem is that Democrat = Liberal = Progressive. Conservative Middle Americans still equate them with Hippies, Women's Libbers (which implies fetus killers), and Civil Rights Protesters. So even if they may agree with many of their programs, they don't want to be associated with them. So they vote Republican and we all lose.

[nigel_k]

1. The 50k guy's job depends on investments made by the 500k guy. If you increase taxes on the 500k guy, he will reduce how much he invests, the tax dollars will be transferred to someone on a low income who will use the money to buy cheap imported stuff, and the 50k guy will be out of work. I don't think the 50k guy needs to be an economist to understand that. He may not understand that prices will also be higher because the effect of the tax is to increase demand relative to supply, but that will just make his problems even worse.

2. The 50k guy doesn't really trust Democrats less than Republicans. He just doesn't like any of them. He doesn't like the 500k guy much either but trusts him to use money more wisely than Congress would use it. He's right about that too.

3. The main problem with high taxes and spending is not so much the fact of redistribution. It's the transfer of decision making power from individuals to politicians, and the misapplication of resources that ultimately follows from that. Given the utter lack of competence and integrity on both sides of Congress, I remain unconvinced there is any better way than just starving them of money until they are forced to spend less. Of course when Republicans are in power they lose interest in actually doing this.

[Phil]

Quote

Entitlements include big health programs like Medicare and Medicaid, for which spending is on autopilot, as well as some other programs for veterans and low-income Americans.

[kenberg]

Nigel, I understand you argument. My guess is that a serious study of motivations would reveal that your argument, right or wrong, is not the basis on which decisions are being made. Of course I could be wrong, but I would like to see a serious study. "Serious" does not mean that I have to agree with the outcome, it means that it has to go beyond having a pollster come out and interview people.

Maybe a guy working the assembly line at Ford is convinced that his job depends on low taxes for the investors. I am doubtful.

Growing up in Minnesota in the middle of the last century, there was Hubert Humphrey and the DFL (Democratic-Farmer-Labor). It was pretty much an article of faith that the Democratic Party watched out for the working guy. That view clearly has changed. You may well think that the explanation is simple: People came to their senses. I think the explanation lies elsewhere.

Surely there have been some serious research papers addressing this phenomenon. When it comes to class warfare, the title of this thread, I am interested in who signs up on which side and why.

[Winstonm]

PassedOut, on 2010-December-30, 09:19, said:

At one time I might have fallen naturally into the republican camp: I've been in business all my life. I strongly believe in personal responsibility and in the efficiency of the free market. I don't believe that the government can solve every problem.

But the utter lunacy of the policies of the republican leaders today makes it impossible for a responsible person to vote republican. Pretty much the whole appeal that the republicans make today is, "There really is a free lunch, and you can have it if you vote for us." And what is really sad is that so many suckers in the US fall for that nonsense.

Welcome to the correct side of the debate. I have been accused of being a liberal, a progressive, and even a socialist, but I am actually closer to you in my thinking than anywhere else. I simply separate ideas into categories where I think they fit best. For example, I do believe in single payer national healthcare but it is only because I think healthcare should be considered a right instead of a business model to profit from - why that makes me evil I have yet to understand.

[Winstonm]

Nigel,

If your argument held any water, Reagan would not have had to raise taxes or raid social security to held pay for tax decreases to the wealthy. If you cut taxes to the wealthy, you create jobs for new cabanna boys and extra banana peelers but little in the way of jobs that provide actual living wages.

(Full disclosure: I also do not trust any argument taken directly from a transcript of a Rush Limbaugh radio program.)

[PassedOut]

Krugman: The New Voodoo

Quote

My nomination for headline of the year comes from the newspaper Roll Call, on July 18: “McConnell Blasts Deficit Spending, Urges Extension of Tax Cuts.”

How did Republican leaders reconcile their purported deep concern about budget deficits with their advocacy of large tax cuts? Was it that old voodoo economics — the belief, refuted by study after study, that tax cuts pay for themselves — making a comeback? No, it was something new and worse.

To be sure, there were renewed claims that tax cuts lead to higher revenue. But 2010 marked the emergence of a new, even more profound level of magical thinking: the belief that deficits created by tax cuts just don’t matter. For example, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona — who had denounced President Obama for running deficits — declared that “you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.”

It’s an easy position to ridicule. After all, if you never have to offset the cost of tax cuts, why not just eliminate taxes altogether? But the joke’s on us because while this kind of magical thinking may not yet be the law of the land, it’s about to become part of the rules governing legislation in the House of Representatives.

So we have leaders in both the senate and the house not only willing to make public statements of monumental stupidity, but also to incorporate that stupidity into the rules. We know how this will turn out -- taxpayers in the years ahead will foot the bill for the free lunch now. And surely that is the intent of the whole stupidity.

[kenberg]

At the risk of stating the obvious, Republicans clamor loudly for reduced taxes and reduced government spending. They excel at the reduced taxes part of this.

The perpetually angry Charles Krauthammer
http://www.washingto...0123003047.html
takes Obama to task for end-of-life counseling. God forbid we actually try to save some money somewhere. Probably it would be better to just cut the tax rate.

[PassedOut]

kenberg, on 2010-December-31, 11:05, said:

The perpetually angry Charles Krauthammer http://www.washingto...0123003047.html takes Obama to task for end-of-life counseling. God forbid we actually try to save some money somewhere.

The huge end-of-life costs we suffer in the US are not only wasteful but are for the most part unwanted and destructive. We've simply got to cut out large amounts of this waste, and Obama is using his office to push this along. I wish he would push harder.

But it's fascinating to note that the same people who push tax cuts always resist real spending cuts. Krugman's "magical thinking" is much too gentle way of putting it.

[kenberg]

Possibly some insight, or at least irony, can be gotten from a Wash. Post article about Mike Kelley, the new Representative from Pennsylvania.
http://www.washingto...ST2010122804476

Mr. Kelley has made a lot of money as a car salesman for GM and apparently decided to enter politics because of government interference in his business. Gotta get the business folks in charge, they know how to do it right.

As I understand events, GM businessmen ran the company into the ground. Yes, unions gave the disaster a helping hand but the guys in charge were the CEOs. Not to put too fine a point on it, Washington intervention saved their collective rear bumpers. GM is back, that's good for the working man, good for the investors, good for the country, and good for Car Dealer Kelley. Congressman Kelley has come to Washington to put a stop to that sort of thing.

Are these tea party folks drinking tea or smoking it?