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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsUgh. The worse inequality gets, the more people agree with Republicans
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/15/opinion/has-obamacare-turned-voters-against-sharing-the-wealth.html?ref=politics&_r=0...
I asked two experts, Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, and Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell, if Luttigs conclusions are consistent with their own research, and both said he is on target. Luttigs conclusions run counter to the view of liberals like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who is calling on her fellow Democrats to make tackling inequality a top priority. Heather McGhee, for example, the president of Demos (motto: an equal say in our democracy and an equal chance in our economy), argues that inequality should be the defining issue of the American political debate this campaign cycle.
...
Even worse for Democrats, the Saez paper found that information about inequality also makes respondents trust government less, decreasing by nearly twenty percent the share of respondents who trust government most of the time:
Hence, emphasizing the severity of a social or economic problem appears to undercut respondents willingness to trust the government to fix it the existence of the problem could act as evidence of the governments limited capacity to improve outcomes.
The findings of the Saez group are consistent with Luttigs. Taken together, they suggest that even if Democrats win the presidency and the Senate in 2016, largely on the basis of favorable demographic trends, the party will confront serious hurdles if it attempts to deliver material support to working men and women and the very poor. Redistribution is in trouble, and that is likely to tie American politics in knots for many years to come.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/15/opinion/has-obamacare-turned-voters-against-sharing-the-wealth.html?ref=politics&_r=0
A very informative, if also depressing, read.
corkhead
(6,119 posts)Erich Bloodaxe BSN
(14,733 posts)The more we ignore it, the more we empower ideological conservatives.
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)rather by making sure that people get paid enough rather than having the government act as a conduit.
"Redistribution" isn't very popular, but increasing the minimum wage and requiring employers to provide benefits is.
cascadiance
(19,537 posts)... so that many people out there that are hurting more than they were earlier understand that this isn't about systematically "taking away from someone" their wealth, but RESTORING the wealth that was taken away from US for the last 20-30 years.
Then it will be hard for them to rationalize that we're taking away "their" money (the wealthy) when we define properly that "their" money is actually OUR money which they've redistributed/stolen from us for the last 20-30 years, and in a way that THEY DON'T NEED IT, unlike many others below their economic class that do need every dollar that they've earned.
deutsey
(20,166 posts)Well, who is out there making the case that government isn't always, as Reagan put it, the problem?
For decades, a lot of Democrats have joined Republicans in repeating the mantra "Government Bad...Government Bad...Government Bad" as they jump aboard the privatization bandwagon.
dhill926
(16,337 posts)world wide wally
(21,740 posts)The Federal Government is the only entity big enough to fight absolute control by corporations. And such are the trappings of fascism.
And Republicans know it.
moondust
(19,972 posts)I suspect a lot of white people reflexively believe Republicans when they demonize government simply because "He's one of us, Margaret, and we're good Christian folks. Don't listen to them DemocRATs and colored folk that just want our money." Voila: the Fox News phenomenon!
Republican demonization of government has been going on for decades as the supergreedy predators they serve don't want to pay taxes or have regulations cut into their profit maximization.