Over at Slate, Daniel Gross has a really dumb piece on rich people voting for Obama “against their own economic interest”. There are many dumb things about this article, starting with the fact that it doesn’t even attempt to answer the question in its title, but the main thing that’s dumb is the framing of the question:
While there has been job loss and economic anxiety throughout Fairfield County, I don’t think that economic problems alone explain the big Democratic gains in the region. In Greenwich, economic stress for many people means flying commercial or selling the ski house (while maintaining the summer house on Nantucket). There’s something deeper going on when a town that is home to corporate CEOs, professional athletes, hedge-fund managers, and private-equity barons, the people who gained the most financially under the Bush years and who would seem to have the most to lose financially under an Obama administration, flips into the Democratic column.
The problem here is that “economic interest” is being defined in the stupidest manner possible, namely as paying the smallest amount in taxes in the short term.
Maybe, just maybe, the wealthy people in Greenwich are smart enough to know that their economic interest extends somewhat beyond their immediate, short-term tax bill, to encompass things like broadly sustainable economic growth for the whole country, not just CEO’s and hedge fund managers. And it might just be that they’ve noticed that the economy as a whole tends to fare better under Democrats than Republicans (particularly mind-bogglingly incompetent Republicans, like we’ve had the last eight years).
Nah…. That’s just crazy talk. It must be hippies putting drugs in the water, or something.
My management and entrepreneurial experience makes me eager to assist the wonderful but severely under-served students of Nia Educational Charter School in academic achievement, growth of character, and in social mobility; rising through America’s covert class structure through Education and Profession. I want our young men and women to make the best possible play of the cards that they hold.
A poor child abandoned by Kenyan father can become President — if he was first in his class at Harvard Law School, and orates beyond the norm of his professorship.
Class Matters
Shadowy Lines That Still Divide
By JANNY SCOTT and DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: May 15, 2005
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/national/class/OVERVIEW-FINAL.html?pagewanted=1
“There was a time when Americans thought they understood class. The upper crust vacationed in Europe and worshiped an Episcopal God. The middle class drove Ford Fairlanes, settled the San Fernando Valley and enlisted as company men. The working class belonged to the A.F.L.-C.I.O., voted Democratic and did not take cruises to the Caribbean.”
“Today, the country has gone a long way toward an appearance of classlessness. Americans of all sorts are awash in luxuries that would have dazzled their grandparents. Social diversity has erased many of the old markers. It has become harder to read people’s status in the clothes they wear, the cars they drive, the votes they cast, the god they worship, the color of their skin. The contours of class have blurred; some say they have disappeared.”
“But class is still a powerful force in American life. Over the past three decades, it has come to play a greater, not lesser, role in important ways. At a time when education matters more than ever, success in school remains linked tightly to class. At a time when the country is increasingly integrated racially, the rich are isolating
themselves more and more. At a time of extraordinary advances in medicine, class differences in health and lifespan are wide and appear to be widening….”
“One way to think of a person’s position in society is to imagine a hand of cards. Everyone is dealt four cards, one from each suit: education, income, occupation and wealth, the four commonly used criteria for gauging class. Face cards in a few categories may land a player in the upper middle class. At first, a person’s class is his parents’ class. Later, he may pick up a new hand of his own; it is likely to resemble that of his parents, but not always.”
“Bill Clinton traded in a hand of low cards with the help of a college education and a Rhodes scholarship and emerged decades later with four face cards. Bill Gates, who started off squarely in the upper middle class, made a fortune without finishing college, drawing three aces.”
“Many Americans say that they too have moved up the nation’s class ladder. In the Times poll, 45 percent of respondents said they were in a higher class than when they grew up, while just 16 percent said they were in a lower one. Over all, 1 percent described themselves as upper class, 15 percent as upper middle class, 42 percent as middle, 35 percent as working and 7 percent as lower.”
“… As Phillip Swagel, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, put it, “We want to give people all the opportunities they want. We want to remove the barriers to upward mobility.”
“Yet there should remain an incentive for parents to cultivate their children. ‘Most people are working very hard to transmit their advantages to their children,’ said David I. Levine, a Berkeley economist and mobility researcher. ‘And that’s quite a good thing.’….”
A poor child abandoned by Kenyan father can become President — if he was first in his class at Harvard Law School, and orates beyond the norm of his professorship.
Yes; and frankly, hallelujiah. I’ve talked to folks who had GWB in their Yale classes; seeing the US vote not *just* for a black man – an event that made me cry, and (to echo Michelle Obama) is one of the few to instill in me great pride in the US – but also for an eloquent and clearly intelligent candidate, was fabulous.
Intelligent and at least somewhat honest, thus far: the Obama web calculator informed me discretely that “you would probably not see a tax reduction under the Obama-Biden tax plan.” Could it possibly have been in our – or almost anyone’s – best interest to vote for McCain/Palin in exchange for a few dollars less income tax paid? I think not. [What price our eternal souls? :)]
Or as Billy Joel commented:
Every child had a pretty good shot
To get at least as far as their old man got
But something happened on the way to that place
They threw an American flag in our face.
I could make a pretty good evolutionary psych argument for an Obama vote being net beneficial to my DNA :-).
I heard a nice explanation of this. A tax increase may be sizable, but an increase in the deficit impinges on exchange rates which affects wealth much greater. Then again some are foolish enough to believe that income has nothing to do with taxes. Not a good assumption if your income depends on government spending.