I am going back to Ryan Lizza’s big profile of Eric Cantor in The New Yorker again, and probably not for the last time. The following excerpt made a strong impression on me, as well as several other people. What struck me wasn’t so much that Rep. Tom Price (R-Georgia) has had his head stuck in the sand or that there are strong regional differences even within the Republican Party. What struck was one particular thing that Mr. Price said.
Tom Price, an orthopedic surgeon from Georgia, who holds Newt Gingrich’s old congressional seat and is seen as a leader of the most conservative House Republicans, said that, during a recent debate over taxes, “we talked past each other oftentimes as much as Republicans and Democrats talk past each other.”
He explained how surprised he was when one of his colleagues from a Northern state told him that he favored a tax increase on millionaires. “It hit me that what he was hearing when he’s going home to a Republican district in a blue state is completely different than what I’m hearing when I go home to a Republican district in a red state,” he said. “My folks are livid about this stuff. His folks clearly weren’t. And so we weren’t even starting from the same premise.”
He’s talking about raising taxes on millionaires. He’s not talking about abortion. He’s not talking about religiosity or state’s rights. I read that and I thought to myself, “Is this really true? Are hordes of non-millionaire southerners ‘livid’ about raising taxes on the top two percent of earners?”
Can this explain why Southern Democrats have tended to be deficit scolds?
My working assumption has been that Blue Dogs went hat in hand to corporate America because their natural constituents in the South are quite poor and unable to make sufficient contributions for the party to compete in the South. This reasoning is based in large part in the genesis of the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980’s, and their reasoning at that time. Maybe it is wrong.
I was reminded of this exchange with Rep. Price while reading a different article in Roll Call about Senate Budget Committee chairman Patty Murray’s plans to unfurl the Democrats’ budget in the coming weeks. Roll Call obtained an internal document (quoted below) that Senator Murray sent out to the Democratic caucus.
“We don’t yet know the details of House Republicans’ updated budget plan, but assuming they keep their promises, we have a good idea about what to expect. Because they have boxed off so much of the federal budget, House Republicans will have to resort to gimmicks or make deep, extreme cuts to programs that impact families, seniors and our long-term economic strength,” the memo said. “We won’t be able to impact the budget House Republicans are preparing. But as we work on our own, and hope to find a path to a bipartisan budget agreement, the House Republicans’ extreme approach makes the need for a responsible alternative that puts middle class families first is all the more clear.”
But while Murray and Democratic leaders are pushing a unified front in preparing to introduce their budget and tackling the Ryan plan head on, not everyone in the caucus is on board. In particular, vulnerable senators up for re-election in 2014 aren’t necessarily looking forward to having to vote on a Democratic plan that carries tax increases — one reason that doing a budget has been politically difficult for Democrats over the past three years.
The vulnerable senators are not named, but they surely include Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, and probably Kay Hagan of North Carolina, as well. There are a couple of non-Southern Democratic senators, like Mark Begich of Alaska and Max Baucus of Montana that could conceivably be in the same group, but it just seems strange that closing tax loopholes exploited by the rich could be a toxic position to take in the South.
This squares with the oft-made point that most southern states get more in federal revenue than they send to the Treasury, yet are the most virulent anti-taxation.
Truthfully, as a liberal in North Texas, I think most of the answer you seek can be found here
I was thinking that, but additionally, the prevalence of right-wing radio and the lack of other voices is stronger in the South than it is up here, so the problem is magnified.
Don’t forget that in a lot of places that Conservative radio is one of the few things on. And that even in places like DFH Philadelphia, Air America was never aired, while Con radio had partial or complete control of 2 stations.
I grew up in Montana and now live in Tennessee. A lot of the Southerns in TN are very similar to the folks I knew growing up, so I really don’t see it as a Southern thing but more of a rural and poor thing.
In rural Maine, I found the opposite. A pretty deep feeling of ‘fuck the rich.’ Often this went hand-in-hand with ‘both parties do it,’ but certainly nobody wanted to protect millionaires.
Both parties DO do it (protect the rich) but one is clearly worse than the other.
I see the same in very rural northern NY. While this area has been historically very “red,” it’s more inclined to not have the knee-jerk reaction that seems to be prevalent in the southern states.
Sample size of one, but I had a long argument with my aunt (who is from the South) on a driving trip a few years back. She was adamantly opposed to any kind of estate tax, even on the extraordinarily wealthy. She’s very much middle class, although she did inherit a small farm from her father, well under the exemption limits even when she inherited it decades ago. Nonetheless she would have nothing of my argument that nobody needs to inherit hundreds of millions of dollars and that taxing megainheritances is the least harmful tax there is. She didn’t have any counterarguments; it was kind of like talking to a brick wall. But the opinion was very much there.
I got that when trying to explain to someone that medicare should be able to negotiate.
“It save the government money!”
“But private industry does it, it’s a market solution!”
The response? Just stating the opinion over and over again that the government should not spend money on health care.
This reminds me of a road argument I once had with a dear but stubborn Rep friend where we got into a back and forth of platforms and then he literally started to rock back and forth and hum to himself to ‘turn me off’. He couldn’t offer a single deliberative counter point to anything but it was a very emotional thing that he felt he HAD to BELIEVE his side. I felt like I was asking him to believe he was adopted or something.
Forgot to add, that was the moment I realized that the only option was to crush these people so thoroughly their opinions no longer mattered.
It has to do with what the government is paying for. Many people are OK with taxation to pay for things they like, such as the military. However when they feel taxation is going to support “tyrannical liberal government” or “schools that don’t teach the bible” they are rabidly against it.
When you view the federal government as an entity hostile to real American’s you want to defund it, and since the rich are where the money is it makes sense to despise taxes on the rich.
Can this explain why Southern Democrats have tended to be deficit scolds?
My working assumption has been that Blue Dogs went hat in hand to corporate America because their natural constituents in the South are quite poor and unable to make sufficient contributions for the party to compete in the South.
Haven’t you learned that all the deficit scolds are frauds? Especially the ones that call themselves Blue Dogs? They all voted for the Iraq debacle. If they were true deficit scolds, they would have made Bush raise taxes to pay for it. They never did. Also, too, what constituents are able to pay for their Congresscritter’s campaign? Are you rich enough to afford giving $2,000 to Gerlach(or a Democrat .. if they were ever to beat Gerlach)?
If I understand his point correctly, he’s saying that Blue Dog Democrats use an image as a deficit scold for political purposes, to appeal to a Southern electorate that likes conservative economic rhetoric and policies.
Which is to say, yes, he does seem to have “learned” that deficit-scolding is used for posturing.
Yes…. I am looking at that “orthopedic surgeon” thing and thinking – how much does he REALLY talk to anyone outside of his income class? Of COURSE he’s anti-tax.
That said, that series of interviews Alexandra Pelosi did in Ala or Miss or wherever, the main point I got was that they were so spiteful they would rather starve and not tax the rich than see the tax money go to black people/Hispanics/godless libruls/whatever, EVEN THOUGH THEY WERE NOT THE ONES BEING TAXED. And it’s not just the South – see What’s the Matter with Kansas (my home state).
It’s an emotional thing, not a logic thing.
The sequester might make it a little less emotional for some of those people. Such as:
It’s going to hit Virginia’s economy hard after being one of the most protected states from the recession.
And a few of the VA GOP House reps are already squawking:
Note: Eric Cantor isn’t whining. No federal workers or the dependents of federal workers in his district?
82% of unionized federal workers report that if furloughed they will have trouble paying for basics. Then there’s this:
All those “little luxuries” that the private sector believes it created all on its own.
I don’t think it would be, but the folks who bought these members of Congress want them to think it is. Now do you understand why I keep talking about the failure of establishment Democrats in the South wanting to put up a real fight.
“the failure of establishment Democrats in the South wanting to put up a real fight.”
Exactly. My 3 term Blue Dog Democrat was defeated by a tea party type in 2010. By that point in time he’d ticked off lots of the African American voters/community by his conservative votes on issues like expansion of the S-Chip expansion for children’s health care, which he opposed. We literally do NOT have any elected Democrats, other than AA ones, who are honest-to-God unabashed and unapologetic progressive and liberal politicians. Actually, to be honest, there aren’t any Caucasian elected officials at all in these parts.
Now the district has been gerrymandered and this Democratic, majority Black small and shrinking city has been SPLIT among 3 representatives, insuring that my voice is totally washed out by an unreconstructed Tea Party type who lives 100 plus miles away and doesn’t even have an office here. The zip code in which I reside is actually split between 2 Republicans, both of whom live a good distance away.
I think the comments above about rural people and southerners only hearing right-wing radio (and right-wing news sources in general) is right on.
But it’s important to understand exactly what is being distorted. The average wingnut: 1) thinks their income percentile is much higher than it actually is, 2) thinks they pay a lot more in taxes than they actually do, and 3) greatly underestimates the benefits they actually receive from their tax dollars. All this goes hand-in-hand with their delusion that the REAL beneficiaries of all those tax dollars are Obama’s brothas in the ‘hood who are living it up with t-bone steaks and cell phones in Cadillacs.
Point (1) above is very important – if you are actually in the 25th percentile of income but THINK you are in the 80th then you THINK that talk about taxing the top 5% is much closer to you than it actually is. And yes, a lot of this thinking is because wingnuts keep dreaming that next year they’ll find some way to strike it rich. Think Sam-the-Skinhead, aka Joe-the-Plumber, and his talk about owning a business and having to pay more taxes at $250k in income when he actually earned less than a 1/5th of that as a part-time employee.
Point (2) is caused a lot by the way income, FICA, Medicare, and optionally self-employment taxes are all wrapped into the 1040 form. This is why the 47% meme was so effective with the right wing. Yes 47% didn’t pay income tax in 2009, but that was broken down in to 28% who paid payroll tax-but-no-income-tax, 10% retirees drawing down on social security and medicare, and 9% students and under/unemployed. A LOT of that 28% heard that, knew that THEY paid taxes were livid about all the lazy n**s and wetb**s who didn’t pay taxes not realizing that, yep, that 47% included them. By the way, this also helped boost the delusion of (1) – if you paid a lot of taxes on your 1040 and you heard that 47% didn’t pay income taxes (which you interpreted as not having paid 1040 taxes), then you MUST be in a much higher percentile.
And of course, last but not least is (3). Call it the Craig Nelson fallacy, after Nelson’s comment that he once was so poor he had to have food stamps and welfare and NO ONE HELPED HIM, so why should the government help THOSE PEOPLE? Wingnuts habitually underestimate how much they get back – and the more they actually receive directly the greater their underestimate. (Some of the staunchest wingnuts I know have never worked for the private sector in their lives and are sitting pretty on military officer’s pensions now.)
So, throw these together and it gives you a better idea of why they oppose increases in taxes on the extremely wealthy.
The problem is that we have 1/3rd of our population who is extremely gullible and will believe anything if it comes from a trusted source – and the sources they trust are owned and operated by the wingnut billionaires
“Some of the staunchest wingnuts I know have never worked for the private sector in their lives and are sitting pretty on military officer’s pensions now”
YES – my brother-in-law !!!
Yes, this is really important. Also the fact that they don’t understand how marginal rates work and think they might win the lottery and Big Government is going to take practically half the winnings.
Somehow had never heard the Craig Nelson line. Classic! Right up there with Alaska Gov. Wally Hickel: “You can’t just let nature run wild.”
Perhaps it’s a party thing. People who join into a cohesive political coalition tend to adopt the views of other members of that coalition on issues other than the big initial point of agreement that brought them into the coalition in the first place. Unionists who become active Democrats come to adopt more socially-conservative policies, while gay rights activists who become active Democrats come to support labor policies, while the both come to support environmental policies. There are a lot of interesting reasons why this happens.
Perhaps middle-class Southern “values voters” and national security hawks have come to adopt plutocratic economic ideology from their fellow Republicans.
Yes, that is a well-known phenomenon, but it doesn’t explain why Southern working class Republicans are more against a tax on millionaires than New York millionaires are.
Sure it does. A lot of New York millionaires are social liberals who weren’t strong economic ideologues, and came to adopt the economic policies of the other Democrats they met.
we’re talking about Republicans. New York Republicans, but still Republicans, who generally differ in their economics (in particular) from their liberal neighbors.
Gotcha.
New York Republicans, and New England Republicans, are an entirely different cohort from Republicans in the rest of the country.
Just because a GOP nitwit asserts that working class Republicans are more against a tax on millionaires than New York millionaires are doesn’t mean that it is true if the issue if presented for an informed vote.
The GOP’s repetition of this nonsense is an attempt to create a self-fulfilling prophecy by exerting traditional Southern means of social control.
You have to factor in race, as GreenCaboose notes above: it’s not just ignorance about their own status (which is just the same in upstate New York) but also endless fear (and ignorance) about the relative status of black people, the beneficiaries of all that imaginary runaway government spending, and the historical depth of it, the past not being past and all.