How To Impress Progressives
September 25, 2011 3 Comments
Warren Buffet has figured it out. What you do is, you write an op-ed pleading for the government to go and take more money away from people who are on the order of ten thousand times less wealthy than yourself. Progressives, having evidently taken sides in the perennial war of the uber-rich against the merely nouveau-riche and upwardly-mobile, will applaud the idea and fawn all over you for your selflessness in asking the government to go and get more money from other, poorer people.
What? Which part of the above description is factually incorrect?
I think you missed the best part for progressives – the thorough and complete contradiction.
Buffet argues that he pays proportionally less in taxes than his secretary therefore taxes need to be raised on the wealthy. The proposals that this get translated into actually raise taxes further on his secretary and don’t do so on Buffet. Not only does this make progressives happy because it is an argument for raising taxes but it makes them happy because it contradicts itself.
Any idiot can see that 2+2=4 but it takes a special person who is versed in the worldview of the Smart People (from succeeding in all the up and outs required to get to Smart People Schools and perfecting it there) to see that 2+2=5 if the Party says so and that you have to raise taxes on the high income working non-wealthy precisely because the high income working non-wealthy pay more taxes than the non-working wealthy.
Matt Yglesias could probably write a very cleverly written article about it.
It might even have a graph.
This is a true point, there is an inability or unwillingness to admit that rhetoric need not match the policy.
I have gotten into conversations with people who think/assume that all that’s being discussed is to ‘raise taxes on people making a million or more’. It is fruitless to point out that raising taxes only on people making a million or more is not and does not resemble the actual policy that would be enacted if passed (just like it was fruitless to suggest that Obamacare once enacted would not ‘let everyone keep their health plans’).
It’s as if people are satisfied forming opinions on the basis of empty rhetoric and don’t want to bother themselves with actual facts – as long as the rhetoric is coming from the right people. As long as politicians have (D) after their name they can rhetorically say X and enact Y and their supporters will insist that X is what happened. The term for folks who approach issues in this way: “reality-based community”, of course.
I think he should pay his secretary more. Tho does he really have “a secretary”???