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Originally Posted by somigosaden
I think the people responding in those polls are ignorant of the statistics of who pays what in taxes. I'm confident I could create a poll where I ask people, "What percentage of total income tax revenues should the bottom 50% of taxpayers pay?" and a huge number of respondents would say 50%, and people with a higher IQ would say something lower, maybe 25% or 10%. Maybe a few people wearing Che shirts would say zero. And then when I total up the average that would surely be higher than 3%, I could publish my results in Breitbart with the title AMERICANS BELIEVE WEALTHY ARE OVERTAXED.
A couple points. First, this doesn't defeat my point. You claimed that Booker putting forward a policy that redistributes wealth from rich people to poorer people was a campaigning mistake. I pointed out that such a policy is popular among people. Your response doesn't show it is unpopular, only that you don't know whether it is popular because you don't trust surveys.
Second, you should trust surveys when they are done by reputable sources like Gallup. What better source do you have for knowing people's opinions? Your made-up survey would be published in Breitbart because it is an obvious hack job and Breitbart is a hack rag, not because it shows Gallup's surveys are wrong.
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But that's more of an aside to what I said in my post. I don't know if Booker's redistribution policies are more extreme than any other Democrat's. If you read my post, you'll see what I'm saying is quite different. What I'm saying is that the race element that is being pushed (by Vox in this case) is what redounds to Booker's detriment. Obama, Yang, Tulsi—they manage to run their campaigns without pounding you over the head with the race card. That article could have presented Booker's plan without ever mentioning race, and yet it insists on mentioning it many times, portraying the plan as a white-to-black redistribution. A politician with a real chance to win the presidency would be chagrined by Vox's article, but the reason Booker's chances are negligible is because Booker would have written it the same way—he's all about the race card.
I don't care what Yang or Tulsi do regarding race - neither of them have any chance of winning the nomination and so don't tell us much about how to run. As for Obama, my memory is that his most well-known and important speech during the 2008 election was
"A More Perfect Union," which was largely about his own experience as a black man in America experiencing racism and how he squares that with a positive and patriotic attitude towards the US. So I don't agree with your characterization of his campaign.
Second, your objection here is not towards Booker's policy, or even his campaign, but rather that
Vox, a magazine oriented primarily towards woke liberals, emphasized the fact that his "baby bond" policy would have a greater impact on black people than white people (even though it is race neutral). If you want to criticize Booker for playing the "race card," do so when he actually does so, not when some other organization that isn't affiliated with him does so.