Non Class War in the USA ?
Via Steve Benen and Greg Sargent.
The Washington Post/ABC News pollsters asked “Do you think the federal government should or should not pursue policies that try to reduce the gap between wealthy and less well-off Americans?”. 62% of respondents answered yes. This should be very unsurprising as it is roughly the same as the fraction who have been telling Gallup that high income people pay less than their fair of taxes for two decades now. It is also similar to the number who support higher taxes on high incomes to pay for the ACA and (in another poll) to prevent exaustion of the social security trust fund.
I have been, partly ironically, referring to this solid majority opinion as “class war” but Benen mentioned something which tends to unermine the class war interpretation/joke
What’s more, support for action in this area is quite broad. A majority of Americans regardless of race, for example, support actions to reduce the wealth gap. A majority of Americans regardless of age agree. Indeed, across the board – gender, level of education, household income, geographic region – there’s a broad consensus that this is an issue worthy of national action.
Wait a majority in the highest income sub group (income over $ 100 thousand a year) answered yes ? That sure doesn’t sound like class war does it ?
In fact, 63% of those respondents answered yes which is actually a tiny insignificant 1% higher than the overall fraction 62%.
Now I think the class war hypothesis can be saved if the vast majority of even the highest income subset don’t consider themselves “wealthy”. I sure wouldn’t consider a family of 5 with income of $101,000 and a mortgage wealthy (even though they are by world standards and very wealthy by the standards of almost all of human history). The class interest based struggle could be between the bottom 99% and the top 1% who are too few to show up noticeably in polls.
update: the vast majority of households with income over $ 100K are not in the top 1%. In fact almost 22% of US households had income over $ 100K back in 2012. What I meant to type is that the results of the poll can be reconciled with the idea that we are all selfish if the vast majority of houeholds with income over 100K don’t think they are “wealthy” but rather think the wealthy are the top 1%. To get in the top 1% a family needed $388,905 already in 2011. The idea I was trying to present is that someone struggling along with $ 120k might want to take from the wealth with $ 400k per year. I’d rather think that people who consider themselves wealthy are willing to share their wealth with the rest of the US (provided other wealthy people do too).
end update
Still the result is nice and potentially very useful to Democratic candidates who can argue that they are not advocating class warfare but proposing that we deal with a national problem as a majority of Americans regardless of their income think we should.
The strategy has the additional advantage that Republican candidates and operatives will have trouble resisting the argument that the poll is meaningless because many people with income over $ 100K* are absurdly poor takers and not like the job creators at all. Some will not hide the fact that families with income of $110,000 per year are much too poor to be in the class whose interests they serve.
*typo corrected thanks to Coberly
Of course 101k per year goes a lot further in some places than others. (Driven largely by the cost of housing). For example the small town in IN (Decatur) where I spent the first few years has a median home price of 87k. 101k would allow quite a house even under the old 2x rule. Of course it is a town of 10k. Or where I used to live in Houston with an average price according to trulia of 100k or a bit less.
if being in the top 1% in income does not make you wealthy, then there is definitely a huge income inequality.
“It is also similar to the number who support higher taxes on high incomes to pay for the ACA and (in another poll) to prevent exhaustion of the social security trust fund.”
Probably the best way to sink the effort to restore equitable rates of taxation on the wealthy is to link that effort to specific forms of government spending, like ACA or SS. Link it to pet peeves of the far right, like budget deficit of the need for military preparedness if a link to specific spending is necessary. Certainly don’t link it to specific social program, especially those that are not funded by the general income tax, like Social Security. Why do liberals always look for ways to sink their own efforts into a quagmire of argument regarding the need for social programs that need funding? Point to the programs that soak up all the revenue, military spending, corporate welfare, etc., but not in a critical manner. Let our reactionary neo-con friends argue against their own self interests.
Well the GOP will always paint it as class warfare and there is an element when it comes to taxes. What the average citizen does not get is that most of the income of the folks with the highest incomes is not taxed at the marginal income tax rates applicable to those folks but at a reduced dividend or capital gains rate. I would be happy to just do away with that favorable treatment and do a bunch of non tax stuff–raise minimum wage, change the overtime hour rules so employers could not work people 70 hours a week because they are “salaried managers” making over $25,000 or whatever the number is these days and shifting government spending from defense contractors to infrastructure and education. The government would get increased tax revenues and the incomes of the bottom 99% would increase without any change in the marginal tax rates.
When you think about it, it should not be surprising for th +100K group. There has been an understanding that the gap between the 1% and even the top .5% is huge enough that those at the lower end of the 1% do not feel a part of the 1%.
or maybe we still have the “tax the other guy, not me” problem.
“class war” except among the class who has loved the meme since 1850 does not play well in America.
possibly you could do better with an “end the graft and corruption” “stop the business frausters” meme, because even the rich, and those who do not think they are rich, don’t like to be robbed.
but almost certainly it would take a political genius like FDR to pull that off. not to say a politician not himself beholden to the financial industry.
btw typos like .62% for 62% and over 100% for over 100k should be fixed. looks better.
i don’t think it makes any difference ‘oo thinks they are “not wealthy.” greed is ugly at any level. but if you avoid a meme that depends on “class war” or “tax the wealthy” you might get further.
not that you won’t have to raise taxes. i suggest the formula: up to 2% increase in FICA phased in over 20 years. About an extra 10% on income over 100k to pay for “the debt.” And about an extra 3% on incomes over median (40k?) but less than 100k… so the people who don’t think they are rich can have the moral satisfaction of helping to pay for their own country’s needs, however they see them, and to save themselves from the charge of hypocrisy when they call for “tax the rich” or demand “equality.”
in general as long as “a majority of Americans” think we should deal with national problems by taxing someone else, i can’t take them seriously.
38% of the country think exploiters, gamblers, hoarders and plunderers need to keep more of their take.
Not sure about class:
Tax breaks for rentiers need to end.
The tax breaks for wall st gambling need to stop.
Tax breaks for carbon polluting need to be replaced with polluters paying for the damage their products do.
Raise revenues is not enough.
4% at least of US GDP goes to crazy enterprises like “protecting” the sponsors of al Qaeda from Iran.
Divert 2% of GDP now slopping in the wasteful pentagon trough to other uses.
coberly,
How many of the 6000 US service-members killed raising the military industry complex (Carlisle Gp) take to >5% of the GDP were not sired by moochers?
“a majority of Americans” think we should deal with national problems by taxing someone else, i can’t take them seriously.”
As long as a majority of Americans (US ain’t doing enough against terrists) think we should deal with international problems by using expensive, useless bombing (to rewrite Vietnam history), and sending other folks’ kids I won’t take them seriously.
The recent wars were on the credit card and the diversion of resources a contributor to the debt crises.
Only the 1% benefit from war.
ilsm
i pretty much agree with you. but i am not sure that’s obvious to all.
for one thing you mention specifics and not some vague “tax the rich” or “class war” or .. some other leftover meme from the Revolution of ’48 or, god help us, the “Enlghtenment(tm)”.
the people are easily misled for they fall in love with slogans and don’t have much time to “study the issues.”
so if you want to make things better you need to study the issues and find someone to explain to the powers that it’s in their interest to make the needed changes. or you need to find a really good slogan and win the revolution (with votes or guns according to circumstances) and hope the new boss is better than the old boss.
history is not encouraging.
The fact that there is self-differentiation within the 1% doesn’t invalidate the idea of class warfare.
By late medieval times in Europe there was a class hierarchy that (in an English example) ran like this:
Royalty
Higher nobility
Lesser nobility
Baronets
Gentry
and THEN interminable layers of the ‘Middle Class’ under which you had many layers and types that today we would lump in as ‘Working Class’.
I don’t have precise figures at hand but you wouldn’t go to far wrong if you saw Royalty as by number the Top .01 the Upper Nobility as the .1 and the Lower Nobility as the 1%. With historically a lot of ‘Class warfare’ between that 1% and the .01% with the .1% folk mostly with the latter but occasionally joining the former. England had a couple of Civil Wars like that, one that culminated in the Magna Carta and another with King Charles I literally losing his head in 1649.
Not to mention that there are plenty of studies that show that a lot of the 1% don’t consider themselves ‘rich’ while some think they are barely clinging to ‘middle class’ (“you can’t get by on $250k in NYC – unless you are my maid of course”). And there is nothing outlandish with the idea that a lot of 1% and .1%ers would be happy with a Transactions Tax or the elimination of the Carried Interest provision where the incidence of that new taxation would fall overwhelmingly on the people with decimal places farther to right.
Think of it this way. Only a tiny handful of CEOs actually have compensation of $10 million a year. There are billionaires like the Koch Brothers who have seen recent years that had their net worth go up 4000% or that or more. For the real top dogs of the economy the salaries of even the most lavishly paid CEOs are on the order of rounding errors. And you can bet the high seven figure guys know the differences between them and the low nine figure ones.
The DNC should be preparing to spend a ton on brand advertising — it is the keeper of the brand, and it has done a terrible job of advancing it in the last decade or so — and some of these commercials virtually write themselves: “The overwhelming majority of Democrats in Congress voted in favor of (pick one: millions of jobs through rebuilding the country’s infrastructure; minimum wage increase; preventing corporate employers from intimidating employees who want to join a union for better wages; and many others); every single Republican in Congress voted against it.”
No matter what issue is chosen, the public policy reason why that vote is a positive should be stated — such as raising the minimum wage to push all wages up from the bottom and improve demand for a growing economy. Longer (60-second) commercials should be considered because they are more likely to convey a tone of seriousness and the Democratic organizations are rolling in money. If half of the money spent on commercials for Brad Schneider in the 10th District Illinois (where obscene sums were dumped for both sides and the same commercial was run scores if not hundreds of times with quickly vanishing effect) had been spent instead on good advertising for the Democratic brand, he probably would have won.
It does not matter if the Democratic vote was unanimous or not. The “overwhelming majority” line is an out for those who didn’t, and by the contrast with the iron-fisted unanimity of the Republicans regardless of how decent and moderate some may claim to be in campaigns, it only reinforces the notion that the Democratic Party is more reasonable. The DNC should represent the will of the majority of Democrats; it’s limit should be that it refrains as far as possible from embarrassing members who don’t vote with the majority.
Bruce
without knowing a lot of history i would bet the top .01% has more to fear from the top 0.1% than from the bottome 50% or 90%.
But if the bottom 50% or 10% showed signs of actually fighting a “class war” I would bet the top 0,1% or 10% or even 50 to 80% would side with the top .01%.
Doesn’t mean the bottom 10% can never win. But they need something more to go on than a good slogan. I think in the case of the American revolution, it was the top 1% or so that led the revolution, with some clever slogans, and perhaps they were sincere about it, that gained them the help of the bottom 50%. I don’t know about the French revolution. Or even the Russian. But if you have a list of ten “revolutions from the bottom” that succeeded, i bet i could find a tist of ten thousand revolutions from the bottom that never happened.
Urban
i myself am not sure the “will of the majority” would lead to good policy. But i’d be glad to see good policy become the will of the majority.
one reason i think the R’s win in spite of their very bad policy is that they are willing, and able, to go out into the community and sell their well researched (focus group) “ideas.” Democrats around here get together in tiny groups and talk about how smart they are and then issue calls for a more civil conversation.
[that was not said very well. what i was getting at was when i was a Democrat activist i noticed that Democrats never did ANYthing to make themselves liked in the community. Just relied on election day phone calls and fliers. It worked well enough…. to elect Republican leaning Democrats.]
Coberly I do know a bit of history and frankly the emphasis by a lot of post WWII Marxist influenced historians on peasant revolts and class warfare get matters upside down. It is not the bottom 10% or 50% who actively strove to wage war on the top 1% or 10% instead it was far more often and much more pervasively the latter who were continually warring on the former.
And I thought it would be clear from the way I listed my hierarchy and with the examples I gave that any threat to the top .01% would indeed come from the top 1% and their paid supporters. We see this clearly in the case of the English Civil Wars when after the overthrow of the Stuart Kings and their Cavaliers by the Parliamentarians and Cromwell the latter and his son-in-lawGeneral Ireton immediately crushed the political claims of the Levellers, which is to say the representatives of the working class. This is indeed how Thompson opens his seminal book The Making of the English Working Class.
The posts that drew my original comment drew on two interrelated conclusions by Sargent and Cilizza. One that most people didn’t put income inequality at the top of their issue list. And two among those who did have it at least somewhere on their list included members of the top 1%. Ergo there is no such thing as class warfare. I just maintain this is willful stupidity on all fronts not least in not understanding the basic top down and mid top to top nature of class warfare historically.
In fact on thinking about it a good way to think about ‘class warfare’ is that it is often enough a civil war among the comfortable to see who has the right to afflict the afflicted via tax and rent extraction.
The war needs to be against the top 0.001% ers who are Living off the rest of us without creating anything of value as discussed by Tom Hartmann here — http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2015/06/only-little-people-pay-taxes-america
actually Bruce
I thought I was agreeing with you in my own peculiar way. Still looks that way from here.
I just don’t find the “class war” meme useful. In fact it seems to be politically counterproductive.
And I did not read the article Bev cited, so it is possible you have a better take on what it said, but going by her it seemed she was upset about campaign finance reform, and then about equality, and now you say class war. Those may all be the same thing, but I suspect we get further by keeping them separate in our thinking.
oops! now it looks like i am doing it…. passing from Bev’s post to this one without realizing they were two different things.
Jerry
the “war” needs to be against the criminals in high places who prey upon the rest of us, and the congress they pay to make their crimes legal.
call for anything that looks like class war and you will drive 80% of the population or more to oppose you.
“all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
I appreciate the posting and comments but have to continue to wonder why folks don’t talk about the need to change or eliminate unfettered inheritance of the centuries that continues to poison the leadership pool.
Maybe also ongoing accumulation of property should be changed to 99 year leases like the Chinese.
IMO, these are the constructs of our social organization that need to be discussed and changed.
coberly,
I commented to an old goat (like me) former work associate/friend at lunch yesterday, “there should be a good investment in firms that make guillotine, soon.”
Bruce,
If the US had made the VC think they had a chance to be as corrupt as the puppets. Instead of trying to kill them “enough” using systems analysis and expensive systems of bombs!
War waged by/for those who own property tend to end like the French 75 years ago in June 1940.
Wars waged by those who don’t look like Mao or Ho/Giap.
In that vein 50 years ago, the VC/NVA nationalists were more a popular war than WW II imperialsts’ war.
ilsm
call me squesmish but i thought the firing squads spoiled the beauty of the Cuban revolution.
and as Robespierre found out, the guillotine cut both ways. That stuff is ugly.
Don’t know if you saw “The Last Emperor.” The reeducation of the last emperor looked to me like a model of hope.
Because while I don’t like jails much… or probably the real facts of “reeducation”… the (former) ruling class needs something to discourage them from just getting back to work and planning their next scam.
and i can’t see any reason why the new boss should act just like the old boss.
Waldmann
I can type a thousand typos per minute.
So it would not be not seemly of me to take a bow for pointing out one of yours.
however i think the .67% (note decimal point) for 67% (no decimal point) is much the more serious error. probably because i used to see it made in an engineering office all the time. kind of thing that loses million dollar mars probes.