Voting Rich

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A few years ago Thomas Frank tried to figure out why the people of Kansas often voted against their own economic interests by turning the lever for the Republican Party.

Ron Formisano, a professor of history at the University of Kentucky, addresses the same issue in his Lexington Herald-Leader op-ed, Poor, Middle Class Vote as if Rich.”  Here is a snippet:

To live poor and vote rich means you do not follow the money. You avoid looking at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the corporations lavishing money on Republicans who voted against taking away tax breaks from companies that ship jobs overseas. You ignore the fact that the millions of jobs lost recently came mostly during late 2008 and the first months of the Obama administration.

You avoid looking at the reactionary billionaire Koch brothers pouring money into California to defeat clean air legislation that might lower profits from their huge oil interests.

Above all, as poor and middle-class voters voting rich you consistently vote to lower the taxes on billionaires like the Kochs —who want to pay no taxes at all — and to insure that you, middle or working class, pay more than your fair share.

You listen to Sen. Mitch McConnell claim that, if the huge Bush tax cuts for the very rich are not kept, then small businesses will be hurt. But to vote rich, you must ignore non-partisan estimates that only 3 percent of small businesses would be affected. You passionately want the rich to pay lower taxes.

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  1. Tom Van Dyke says

    More evidence that being a history professor is no guarantee of wisdom [or even factual honesty] about current events. No offense, John.

    Rich-voting ordinary folks obsess about gays and guns but ignore rising inequality that is turning this country into Pakistan, where the opulent rich pay no taxes while the middle class supports inadequate public services.

    Forget the gays-and-guns boilerplate and the implicit sneer at “ordinary” folk. Pakistan? Patently ridiculous. Further, as one commenter wrote, “the rich” in the US already pay a disproportionate amount of income tax, because we have a graduated income tax, which everybody's cool with.

    But without getting into that statistical morass, Washington state, which just went Democrat in its major races, also voted down a soak-the-rich Initiative 1098, 65%-35%. It ain't just those benighted Bible-and-gun-clinging Kansans. Washington is about an 8 on the blue-state scale.

    What folks like Thomas Frank and Professor Formisano continue to fail to understand is that the majority of the American people—God knows why—reject class envy, or solely voting to benefit their own bottom line.

    And without either or both being true, the Marxist explanation of politics continues to fail in accounting for the soul—and the votes—of the American people.

    I use marxist [small “m”?] as a worldview based on economics, of course. Not calling anyone a communist here. But one can have a professorial knowledge of history, but if viewed through a flawed prism like Marx's, he understands nothing, least of all America.

    For I put it to you, John, and/or your readers—doesn't it speak well of the American people that they would vote the same whether personally poor, middle-class or wealthy, based solely on what they think is right and what is good for our country?

    The Koch Brothers-supported Prop 23 failed 60-40, BTW, even though it will likely hurt the state economy. How come they never ask What's the Matter with California?

    [Actually, they do, but the answer is the same. Americans just don't vote their pocketbooks.]

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