Just go read it, bookmark it for later reference, and come back to discuss.
About The Author

BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Before I even hit the link I assumed it would be a hit piece on Edwards or Huckabee. That was two-fer there. And as all George Will pieces, it doesn’t say a damn thing, except, “Now how will this make me money?”
Actually, I think the best summary would be, “Let them eat cake.”
…which makes me wonder whose side Obama’s really on, but it rankles me that he equates Edwards with Huckabee as populists of the same color. They are not, but of course, Will is playing kingmaker in this column.
It makes you wonder whose side Obama is on? Well, I’m not sure he’s on Will’s side, but I think Will senses that Obama will not do too much to upset the status quo.
Well, I’m not sure he’s on Will’s side, but I think Will senses that Obama will not do too much to upset the status quo.
Exactly.
Let the corporations do it is not what I have in mind for a Dem president’s policies.
All this hullabaloo about Obama is going to turn rancid in a month if he performs true to form. And there won’t be a kind of truth and reconciliation organization around to assess and to repair the damage BushCo has done to America, either.
Oh yes, the Village has decided that they still hate Hillary and that Edwards is Unserious to the point of being an apostate.
Obama’s got his problems, but anybody George Will dismisses as “histrionic” must be on to something.
George Will writes:
That is like a parody of sloppy thinking. That can’t be an accident.
$30,000/yr might have been middle class in 1979, it certainly is not, now. And if the number of people making less than that a year is unchanged since 1979, then something is very, very wrong.
The whole paragraph is based on that same simple, stupid mistake. It’s like he’s not even trying.
I reacted to that as well.
Will’s source is this article by Stephen Rose.
Rose’s paragraph is ambiguous; he talks of ‘inflation-adjusted income’, but it is not clear that the 30,000 – 100,000 bracket is adjusted from 1979 to now. Regardless, I would strongly disagree that an income of 30,000 represents ‘middle class’. A single person would live rather restrained on such an income in most US locations; imagine, then, supporting a family.
In any case; George Will is an idiot.
… threshold is $30,000 in the article is because it is estimated that means tested benefits phase out at from $25,000 to $35,000.
And then the argument is that the under 25% in the group that benefits directly from safety net is why populist policies fail to attract majority support.
Just what you would expect from “3rd Way”, “screw the poor, we need to appeal to the middle class and upper-middle class”, “New Democrats/Labor/etc.” think tanks.
And just why the conservatives are so eager to avoid passage of universal health care, because that, like Social Security and Medicaid, will be a government program that provides substantial benefits to those at the bottom and also well up past the 50% rung on the income ladder.
what’s the poverty level? isn’t it $17,000 for a family of four? am i mistaken?
so now, his “middle class” is defined as not even making twice the poverty level?
don’t do me any favors by defining my economic status, george will!
plus, i love it when these guys pull out this old canard:
strangely, these fists have imposed a tax code that makes the top 1 percent of earners pay 39 percent of all income tax revenues, the top 5 percent pay 60 percent, and the bottom 50 percent pay only 3 percent.
but of course, the tax system does not tax human beings. it taxes the incomes owned by human beings.
in other words, the irs doesn’t demand 39% of a person’s flesh (this isn’t the merchant of venice).
what will conveniently leaves out of his complaint is that the top 1% of earners who pay that 39% of income tax revenues happen to own 39% of the wealth in america.
and the top 5% who are paying 60% of tax revenues, actually own 59% of the wealth. so it’s really damn equitable, if you want to compare two percentage numbers that are actually related, unlike what will originally does (comparing the percentage of people with the percentage of tax revenue…people to revenue, as opposed to revenue to revenue, as i do).
Confuse the issue and for what? So that the rich get richer? What the hell is wrong with him…..the asshole.
i am mistaken. the 2007 poverty level for a family of four is $20,650.
… acknowledged the point that the poverty line is widely criticized for being too low, then uses a lower threshold based on means testing that starts to scale down benefits from the poverty line and up, and simply treats it as automatic that the level where means tested programs taper off is where the middle class begins … rather than being the result of decades of effort to undermine spending on the social safety net and ensure that as many people as possible are omitted from the social safety net.
But that’s the thing with a think tank paper … whether a DLC think tank, like this paper, or a think tank funded by the Dirty Six, like the anti-minimum-wage think tank I had to trawl through during the minimum wage debate here in Ohio in 2006 … it does not have to go through even conventional wisdom filtering for quality … as long as it reaches the fore-ordained conclusion and has a surface sheen of plausibility, that is enough.
All that number juggling just so people over $200,000 can keep all their investment income and at everyone elses expense. Benjamin Franklin felt you should not pay taxes until your family was cared for and fed. Meaning only the wealthy and the corporations should pay taxes. I’m not bitter I’ll pay my share but don’t freaking patronize me with your bogus numbers.
Franklin quote in this book.
Franklin was wealthy too. I trust his opinion far more then greedy ass George Will.
Yeah, I laughed at 30K being middle class. We raised 4 children on 30K in the 90s and it sure didn’t feel like middle class to me when the church had to drop off canned goods and we couldn’t go to the doctor because we had no health insurance and our electricity was off more than it was on.
Time for George Will to spend a year living the $30,000 middle class lifestyle. I’m sure it would be an eye opener for him.
Yes, my first thought was that families with $30,000 incomes rarely have any kind of medical insurance.
Only a mentality that doesn’t know the price of a gallon of milk would agree with Will’s cherry picking.
I did like the jab at Mitt: “versatility conviction”
I learned during the GOP debate that health insurance vs. none is a matter of choice; therefore, if an individual without health insurance receives care, it should not be subsidized in any way. Their substantial savings will be sufficient to cover expenses.
yeah, we stupidly chose buying food and paying the rent instead. We were young and stupid.
Not so stupid. I’m sure you knew that you could always just milk the system in a Free Health Care Bonanza!!
Nope, we made too much to get free medical care. And our various ER bills added up and up even though we tried to pay them a little at a time, and eventually led to lawsuits. You just get deeper and deeper…
he’s VERY trying.
Income Mobility and the Fallacy of Class-Warfare Arguments Against Tax Relief
by D. Mark Wilson
March 8, 2001
In this article, the Heritage Foundation made a similar argument in 2001 against taxing the rich and repeal of the “death” tax. They claimed,
THERE IS SUBSTANTIAL INCOME MOBILITY IN THE UNITED STATES
(Mobility Rates, Percent, from 1969 to 1994)
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Taxes/BG1418.cfm
The trouble with this graph is that at the time, it was downward mobility that was the populist theme. The graph shows that in 25 years ending in 1994, 60% starting out in the bottom quintile advanced to a higher quintile. But it also shows downward mobility, as people in higher quintiles slid into a lower one, and in order to be consistent, 60% necessarily had to take the place of those advancing themselves from the bottom.
By contrast, this graph suggests that only 21% who started out in the second quintile, fell back into the lowest quintile. The numbers don’t add up. And throughout this period, except for an increase of people living in poverty during the Reagan years, the poverty rate has been fairly consistent, at least 12%.
I’m not economist, but “income mobility” is rather vague.
After all downward mobility is still mobility. Even if there were more downward income mobility than upward income mobility, there would still be substantial income mobility.
In other words, if a lot more people are making a lot less money, that is also “substantial income mobility.”
The question is whether there’s substantial income mobility, but in which direction it’s headed.
Hey wasn’t George Washington a populist? I mean the guy was elected unanimously for goodness sake.
I love it when rich old guys tell everyone out there to quit complaining about being poor – it’s great! That’s why Rueben Bolling’s “Lucky Ducky” comic series is so funny – painful but funny.
It’s nakedly obvious the elitsya of the US absolutely loathe the democratic process because it gives the power to those unwashed, uneducated masses and this article shows that unambiguously.
Pax
Seems to me that the rate of new jobs added since GW Bush took office has been pretty consistently under what it takes just to keep up with population growth. Atrios keeps winning his “under” bet far more often than he loses it. So the paragraph folks are poiting to here smells pretty fishy to me.
And what a seamy underbelly it is. Wow what a hit piece.
Even if you make a combined income of something like $110,000 or $120,000 a year and have kids in NJ, the NYC burbs, The Philly Burbs, California, Seattle, Chicagoland, even middle American places like Minneapolis and St. Paul and you have kids, you’re still struggling to get by!
The best public schools are all in enclaves of wealth, it takes forever to commute, smaller houses in wealthy towns with those good schools are being torn down to make way for the over $300K a year crowd, energy and food prices keep going up and up and up.
There’s a middle class squeeze going on and if you’re not in the oil, defense, pharma or health insurance biz you’re screwed.
You bet that middle class is shrinking and there’s nothing left for retirement or your kids.
There are so many absurdities in this article it’s mind-boggling. But equating Huckabee and Nixon has to be one of the most outrageous.
Here is a good question: What do Huckabee and Nixon have in common? The only thing I come up with is that five o’clock shadow thing.
Will acts as though Nixon’s famous 1952 comment that Pat wore “a good Republican cloth coat” was some kind of populist appeal. George Will certainly knows better. The remark was made during Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, when he was fighting for his political life and trying to deflect accusations of graft.
Huckabee is a great natural politician; Nixon always seemed uneasy in public. Huckabee has the best sense of humor in a Presidential candidate since Mo Udall. Nixon’s sense of humor was so atrophied that in “Jailbird” Kurt Vonnegut could speak of the only time Nixon was known to have made a joke. Huckabee is dangerously ill-informed on world affairs; Nixon was a sophisticated Cold War strategist. Nixon had no discernible religious beliefs (he was raised a Quaker, but I guess it didn’t stick). Most of all, Nixon was anything but a populist.
Rather than attempt to discuss the distortions in our economic and political life brought about the great concentration of wealth that has taken place over the last decade or two, Will takes the low road here and ascribes Populist beliefs to deep-seated resentment of the rich from people who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. Way to go, George. I’m sure you’ve learned by years of experience that insulting people is a very effective method of convincing them.
Nixon actually had some fairly liberal/populist domestic policies, not the least of which was the idea of reducing the work week to 35(?) hours. But in general, I agree, there isn’t much similarity between Nixon and Huckabee.
I can say, though, that given a hypothetical matchup between the two, I’d probably vote for Nixon.
Barack Obama, who might be mercifully closing the Clinton parenthesis in presidential history, is refreshingly cerebral amid this recrudescence of the paranoid style in American politics. He is the un-Edwards and un-Huckabee — an adult aiming to reform the real world rather than an adolescent fantasizing mock-heroic “fights” against fictitious villains in a left-wing cartoon version of this country.
Yep, coporate interests aren’t a driving force in our government. We’re all just delusional.