Why Class Warfare Doesn't Work in America
In his re-election campaign Obama has shifted from a broad general appeal to class warfare, hoping to gain traction by proposing to cure the nation's woes by taxing 'millionaires and billionaires', apparently without sensing any obligation to show how that course would accelerate economic growth, improve the unenmployment situation or enhance the general prosperity. In fact it would not, and beyond the radical left, including the mainstream media, Hollywoood, Academia, the generality of jealous malcontents and the permanent leftist political class the class appeal is a lost cause. There are two primary reasons for this.
First, Americans actually understand that you cannot tax the rich out of our troubles and into solutions because there simply are not enough rich people with enough money to do that. The voters are not as stupid as the radical left thinks they are, and this defect in class-warfare strategy at this time is obvious to most people. If circumstances were not so dreadful as they are there might be some possibility that a rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul strategy could actually work, at least temporarily, by postponing the day of reckoning. But that is not now the case and most of the voters know that. Furthermore, they know that business, and therefore growth, are discouraged by excesses of taxation and regulation and they are generally convinced that such excesses exist now.
Second and more fundamental is the fact that class envy is foreign to the thinking of most Americans due to the significant degree of class mobility in this country. There are fixed class distinctions in most of the rest of the world, more in some regions than others, but just about everywhere except for Canada, Australia and a few other countries most of which speak primarily English. Many Americans, if not most, have relatives on the low end of the socio-economic scale and others on the high end. That's America, Abe Lincoln growing up in poor backwoods circumstances with one year of formal education only to become a brilliantly self-educated president of the United States. Whatever your circumstances you may realistically hope to improve them if that is your ambition. And --- America is so bountiful and free that many folks are satisfied where they are. Money isn't everything. Regardless of that, with conditions like we have in America people are not so anxious to destroy a class to which they themselves may aspire to become members even though they are not members now. Ask Oprah Winfrey, who came from as far down on the social register as you can get --- poor, abused, unhappy childhood --- and became the famous billionaire we all know. It is just a fact; Americans are not class-identified.
Mr. Obama's advisors should advise him to get a new strategy if he hopes not to be buried in a fifty-state landslide.
First, Americans actually understand that you cannot tax the rich out of our troubles and into solutions because there simply are not enough rich people with enough money to do that. The voters are not as stupid as the radical left thinks they are, and this defect in class-warfare strategy at this time is obvious to most people. If circumstances were not so dreadful as they are there might be some possibility that a rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul strategy could actually work, at least temporarily, by postponing the day of reckoning. But that is not now the case and most of the voters know that. Furthermore, they know that business, and therefore growth, are discouraged by excesses of taxation and regulation and they are generally convinced that such excesses exist now.
Second and more fundamental is the fact that class envy is foreign to the thinking of most Americans due to the significant degree of class mobility in this country. There are fixed class distinctions in most of the rest of the world, more in some regions than others, but just about everywhere except for Canada, Australia and a few other countries most of which speak primarily English. Many Americans, if not most, have relatives on the low end of the socio-economic scale and others on the high end. That's America, Abe Lincoln growing up in poor backwoods circumstances with one year of formal education only to become a brilliantly self-educated president of the United States. Whatever your circumstances you may realistically hope to improve them if that is your ambition. And --- America is so bountiful and free that many folks are satisfied where they are. Money isn't everything. Regardless of that, with conditions like we have in America people are not so anxious to destroy a class to which they themselves may aspire to become members even though they are not members now. Ask Oprah Winfrey, who came from as far down on the social register as you can get --- poor, abused, unhappy childhood --- and became the famous billionaire we all know. It is just a fact; Americans are not class-identified.
Mr. Obama's advisors should advise him to get a new strategy if he hopes not to be buried in a fifty-state landslide.
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