Rich? Not You, Not Me?

This is the last part of the piece at http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson101609PF.html

********************************************************

Rich? Not you, not me?

All the news agencies picked up this USA Today story: “Democrats in the House today represent a combination of both the wealthiest and poorest districts across the nation, a different composition than in 2005, a USA Today analysis of Census data indicated Wednesday. Democrats now represent 57 percent of the 4.8 million households that had incomes of $200,000 or more in 2008. In 2005, Republicans represented 55 percent of those affluent households.”

This seems to be an enormously revealing, but mostly neglected, story:

a) It gives credence to the old impression that the modern Democratic Party is not sensitive to the middle-class complaint that the wealthy can afford the redistribution of money to the poor that falls inordinately on the middle class who can’t.

b) We have not seen Obama’s promised tax hikes yet. When the lifting of FICA caps, the increase in income taxes on the top brackets, surcharges for healthcare, etc. are enacted, will those who make over $200,000 continue to support the huge new entitlements and deficit spending? It was easy to rail against Bush as heartless when he cuts your taxes, but will it be so easy to encourage Obama’s spending sprees when yours are actually raised?

c) There is something very Roman about this, in the sense of the upper-classes seeking exemption from popular outcry at their exalted status, by a sort of bread-and-circuses entitlement insurance policy. In more practical purposes, the survey would mean in my work area, that those in the Redwood City barrio and those in the East Palo Alto ghetto, who draw more inordinately on food stamps, housing subsidies, and Medical, have a natural affinity with those in $3 million homes in the rather apartheid Palo Alto and Atherton — but neither so much with the working classes in a Sunnyvale or Milpitas (more racially diverse communities than either Atherton or Redwood City). The rich offer bromides for the poor, but are exempt by their capital from the consequences should such social policy prove ill thought-out. Apparently a lawyer who makes $250,000 and hears constantly Obama’s now tiresome rant about the “rich” either thinks that his own liberality exempts him from the charge that he has ill-gotten gains; or that he has enough that an extra 20-30K in income and payroll taxes won’t matter that much; or that Obama will treat taxation as he has Guantanamo — a strident talking point that remains that. (Most likely he will just let the Bush tax cuts naturally expire, and say ‘they’, not he, hiked taxes on the middle classes.)