which in itself, is already a huge tax cut

It's also, coincidentally, the Koch's home base. I bet if you asked them, they'd tell you that Kansas was doing great.

The tribal identity issue is really central to my point. AllTheCheese and maxtower are basically saying "but won't leftist policy hurt people making $300k/year?" Well, maybe, but that's far from certain, and it doesn't really matter. It's not super important in the short term political future, because the left's real issue is that the ultrarich are sitting on an ungodly pile of money while human beings down the street are starving. Marginal tax rate hikes on the upper middle class aren't solving that problem anytime soon. maxtower also points out that the upper middle class doesn't comprise a super high percentage of the population. That's pretty much dead wrong from a political perspective: they are something like 15% of the voting population. But whatever.

Part of what makes the "can you get by on $250k in NYC?!" memes sort of interesting is that they have a point. If you have kids and want the comfortable lifestyle you can get in the 'burbs (on $80k/year) while living in the city, you're not going to be swimming in excess money. If the point is to garner sympathy for these folks, it's silly. But if the point is "Jesus Christ, why does it cost so much to exist in New York?" then it's a good one, and it would be beneficial to the left if these folks could be made to take a step back and wonder why they are paying to compensate for, say, a real estate shortage caused in large part by oligarchs who pay a fraction of the percentage they do in taxes.

It was a running joke shortly after Occupy Wall Street popularized the "top 1%" concept that some inordinately large percentage of the population thought that they actually were in the 1%. That's not because they can't do math. It's because they think they are winners. They went to good schools, bought good houses, and are raising good kids. They go to cocktail parties with very wealthy people, and regale their friends with tales of meeting them. They get expensive tickets to sporting events when their boss doesn't need to host a client that evening. They're comfortable.

At the end of the day though, the upper middle professional class is labor, and the oligarchs are capital. The favoring of capital over labor is deeply embedded in our country's politics and policy. The point isn't that these folks need to empathize with the working class per se, it's that they can be brought to recognize that perhaps they aren't as comfortable as they believe they should be. Those "can $400k a year feed a family of 3?!" memes are the output of a class of people who are wondering why they don't have a bigger slice of the pie, and the left has a coherent answer to that question.

Either I am not understanding what you were saying or you missed my point.
http://www.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls

Only 10% of the electorate makes over $200k. And they don't vote significantly different based on income until you get to groups making less than $50k. This makes me think there aren't a lot of votes up for grabs for the Dems based on income related issues.

That 2016 breakdown is likely because if you are in your prime earning years, a Trump disruption doesn't sound too enticing.

2012 Romney won 200k+ like 56-42 I believe.

Ok, so you're talking about a 5-10 pt swing on 10% of the electorate. That's only 1% of voters, which sure is a nice little pick up, but what do you have to give up to bring those people in?

Picking up a couple of percent is huge, not minor. More importantly, though, the professional class has a massive influence on politics and policy. They comprise the vast majority of the media, legal field, etc. We are not just talking about winning elections. There is a lot to be said for having these people (correctly) identify with labor rather than capital.

But my point is not so much about political strategy, it's about what there is to be gained by pushing the left's coherent and powerful narratives rather than the wishy washy triangulation of the centrist Dems.

A lot of these people are would-be centrist Dems though. I wouldn't think people make the transition from GOP voter to Lefty voter without at least stopping in the centrist Dem area.

Pushing the discussion leftward is the entire goal.

I agree with all this, I'm just saying it's tough to get very successful professionals making 300k to identify with the minimum wage crowd for a variety of interesting cultural/aspirational reasons. These people will crow about how tough life is and how they don't feel rich, but they're still gonna vote for lower capital gains taxes and cutbacks for school lunch programs. To be fair, Republicans can make a pretty strong case for their tax plans by throwing scraps that directly help these people.

Is it true that Republicans are more affluent than Democrats?

Smart people make more money than dumb people.

Are Republicans smarter than Democrats?

I think they are more heartless. But that is to be expected of richer people. They don't care about less fortunate people. As the previous poster said, they can't relate at all. But they also think their lives are tough because they are in a rat race to keep up their standard of living.

Maybe nobody is really happy. The human condition.

My point in the broadest terms is that they generally oppose assistance to the poor because they feel like they are winning and that redistribution punishes winners and rewards losers. Those "struggling to make it on $250k" memes are an indication that that identity is more tenuous than one might imagine.

American political thought is dominated by a moral justification for economic outcomes. That is, that outcomes are morally just as a rule. The rich are being rewarded for the value they bring, and the poor deserve their status because they have failed to create more value. It's just world theory all around. The idea that morality is wholly separable from the market is essentially a leftist conceit. Poorer people tend to see the two as separate, and in fact see their relative position as unjust. If the left can push that narrative to the point where it has some foothold among the more comfortable, it will strip away a lot of the insulation that those folks give to the very, very rich.

http://www.people-press.org/2015/04/...y-affiliation/

sorry, fyp seems correct tho

Pushing the discussion leftward is not how you pick up those GOP high earners, which is what I thought you were trying to say. Now I am confused.

I don't understand where our resident economic freedom-fighter wj94 went since the election? I guess his heroic services are needed elsewhere?

+1

Particularly when AHCA's linchpin was a version of the continuous coverage requirement he was pushing.

The only conversation I'm interested in having about GOP high earners is how to trick them into falling into a pit filled with spikes.

This isn't emphasized enough. One reason is that most people don't realize how much the trillions they have really is. They could easily buy every poor person a Cadillac.

But in my opinion the more important reason that their insane wealth should get more emphasis is that it renders irrelevant the idea that many poor people often have mainly themselves to blame for their own bad shape. Liberals spend too much energy trying to refute this idea, even though it is sometimes partially true, and not enough time saying "so what". You might not want to help out an acquaintance who is in bad shape because he screwed up in the past. But if you are very rich you should do it anyway. Especially if he is trying to support a family that is not to blame for his flaws.

So their fortunes would go to their heirs?

This is where I'm at.

That Sklansky post should be on the Mount Rushmore of right wing guys accidentally arguing for communism. He's absolutely right, the left spends a ton of time arguing about the "deserving poor", they embrace the right wing premise that the poor can be subdivided into deserving and non-deserving and then just argue that more of the poor are deserving.

And on the other end, they ****ing love means testing to exclude people who "make too much" from various programs, **** like "we need to make sure these programs go to those who really need it" when they talk about income caps for free college and ****.

Everyone needs it. Everyone is deserving. They are people.

Autocratic is also obviously correct, far too many middle class people see themselves as makers(vs. takers), when in fact the praxis should be labor vs. capital.

It's spike filled pits all the way down.