My brother sent along an email from another resident of his Stepford Neighborhood. I've pasted a particularly telling paragraph from it below, to give you a glimpse of how Obama voters think:
There is no entitlement class, however there is the "middle class" (you and I). Since the 80's tax cuts the middle class has lost 600 billion dollars a year in "redistribution" of wealth to the top 2%. The gap between the middle class and the wealth in this country has widen ever year over the past 20 and continues to. Trickle down economics has not worked. Of course when you give tax breaks and corporate welfare that is not considered socialist policy is it? All Obama is doing is giving the engine of our economy, the middle class (you and I) a better tax break. It puts money back in the hands of people who will feed the economy by spending it on their children, home, Walmart, NEW CAR, ect. Even Warren Buffet agrees with that.
Read that again; this fellow claims that the middle class has lost 600 Billion dollars in redistributed wealth to the top 2% of wage earners. This is preposterous. The GDP of this country has grown nearly $5 Trillion in just the past eight years....this is a growth in wealth, not a redistribution.
Now in all fairness to my neighbor, he did once sit next to Warren Buffet at a luncheon, and he did photograph Larry Sabato for a recent magazine article. Therefore his views on economics and politics can not be questioned.
ReplyDeleteCW -- Frankly, the remarks are spot on. Facts, not assertions, are needed to support your position. AND regarding that extra 5 trillion in the US economy -- guess what? That is the amount our deficit has grown during that same period. It can be agrgued, the folks that gained the most from these "Reagan" type tax policies are the peolple in the top income brackets; not the latter.
ReplyDeleteFrankly Anonymous, I disagree with you. I did support my position, with a link to US Government GDP data, which show the total value of goods and services produced in this country...it has risen $5T. That means that the economy has grown by $5T. I'm not sure how that relates to the deficit (I think you mean debt), but if I thought really hard about it, I think I'd find the two values relatively unrelated (if not completely unrelated).
ReplyDeleteOf course the people in the top income brackets benefitted the most; they pay the most taxes. I hope I don't have to go into that again.
What needs to be supported is any assertion that there has been a redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the upper class. I know of NO evidence for this. Has middle class buying power eroded; yes. Is that a redistribution of wealth: nope.
Anonymous:
ReplyDeleteWasn't it evident to you that my neighbor is an idiot when his initial statement was, "There is no entitlement class..."
This fellow also supports the Dems because of their stance on "global warming" yet he is set to move from his 3000 square foot home to a 5000 square foot McMansion and increase his daily commute from 12 miles round trip to almost 50.
Which is all fine by me because I am an agnostic when it comes to the global warming issue and I believe that one should be able to build the biggest home that one can afford. But this hypocrite will be whining a few years from now about the cost of college for his kids and he'll expect the government (i.e. the taxpayer,i.e. me) to foot the bill.
He's made his economic choices, he should live by 'em.