Okay, so a couple days ago, the Good Doctor Mondo and I are driving through our housing development...
The development is broken up into four quadrants. One is comprised of condos (both single story, and four-plexes). Two are composed of single family homes and garden homes, from the low $200s to around $400k or so. And the last, which abuts a private country club, is entirely custom homes that went from $600k - $1.5m.
The development is recent, with the first construction taking place in 2000, and in fact, our quandrant (the last to begin) isn't even complete.
We noticed something interesting on this drive. Going through three of the quadrants, we noticed lawn signs for Obama and McCain (as well as lower tier races), and it appeared no more than around 60% or so of the signs were pro-Obama.
But when we got to the high end custom quadrant, there were zero Obama signs at all (though I saw lots of golf carts in the open garages pointing directly to the country club). Not to say every yard had a sign, which they clearly did not. But of the 30% or so yards that had signs, every single one of them was a McCain/Palin sign. And I'm pretty certain Joe the Plumber doesn't live in the Starwood development.
So when you think about just who is in line to benefit from a McFailin' victory, just take a look at the yard signs. It's not for no reason that it appears McCain has a much greater amount of his support from those who already have the most, and who benefited from the single greatest transfer of wealth in American history. Just like it's not for no reason that McCain couldn't bring himself to utter the phrase "middle class" even one time in three debates. McFailin' wouldn't know the real working class if he stepped onto the lawn of one of his eight homes long enough to hand his yardman a glass of lemonade.
If McFailin' is truly for the middle class, then tell me this, why is his support nearly universal in the wealthiest neighborhoods, and less than half in the working and middle class developments?
3 comments:
Uh ... maybe people who worked hard for what they have don't want your socialist candidate to "redistribute the wealth?"
I know you don't mean it quite like this, but your comment implies that those not making $250,000 per year are somehow simply not working as hard. And you know that's bullshit on its face. After all, how hard do you work?
Think about what "redistributing the wealth" actually means. Every time the government passes a certain farm subsidy, say, to the massive sugar farmer conglomerates that put the small farmers out of business, that's "redistributing the wealth".
The $4 billion in tax breaks the nation's largest oil producers current get? That's "redistributing the wealth". In those cases, and many others, that's the government (Republican led for most of the last 28 years) taking money from the working man and giving it to the already-wealthy.
The code phrases the right would like to attempt to stain the left with, do not match the reality, which is that every government action redistributes.
Republicans and Democrats both redistribute wealth. The right's current complaint is based on their perception that Democrats simply don't work as hard? Really?
The great irony is that the vast vast majority of people voting for McCain will, in fact, actually benefit from Obama's proposed tax cut, and would not benefit from McCain's form of redistribution.
>> "Republicans and Democrats both redistribute wealth."
...and it's completely immoral for either side to do so. Subsidies of any kind are also immoral. They take the result of one person's work and give it to those who have not earned it. Compulsory taxation combined with an unlimited ability to disburse funds to any entity for any reason leads inevitably to this sort of injustice.
This is why I am an advocate for laissez faire. If the government is not permitted to expropriate property, redistribute it, and rig the rules in favor of any particular party, then you do not have class warfare of any kind.
The capitalist-statist mixed economy (which is what we have) leads inevitably toward the sort of class and pressure-group warfare that is evident in your anecdotal neighborhood sign survey.
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