Liberals Scared to Death by Their Own Caricature of Trumpettes

Federal Reserve hacking its own recovery to death

 

Everyone must stop saying they are “stunned” and “shocked.” What you mean to say is that you were in a bubble and weren’t paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair. YEARS of being neglected by both parties, the anger and the need for revenge against the system only grew. Along came a TV star they liked whose plan was to destroy both parties and tell them all “You’re fired!” Trump’s victory is no surprise. He was never a joke. Treating him as one only strengthened him.   –Michael Moore on the failure of both political parties in America

 

How delusions become reality

 

This past week, as I put together my coverage of Hell Week, I read how some liberals are creating petitions for the west coast to secede from the union. I read about the Canada immigrations web site being overwhelmed after the US election by visitors looking for an escape route from the US. I read about high-school kids who once sat peaceably next to each other in class rising up in class to beat up their classmates who voted for Trump. Prior to the election, I heard my own liberal friends say how they’d have to leave the country if Trump won.

Why? The country isn’t any different the day after Trump won than it was the day before … except that perception has changed dramatically everywhere because of one man who deliberately spoke as far outside of political correctness as he could … and won the highest office in the land by doing so.

Liberals are afraid of their own shadows right now. That’s because they’ve created anti-matter, Mr. Hyde caricatures of the Trumpettes — the average little guys who support Trump. These shadows that liberals have cast by their own self-deceit now surround them, and they believe the grotesquely exaggerated images they have created.

This false belief like any phobia is taking on its own life by creating mass hysteria in the streets of America. By that step, belief becomes reality. While the initial description that liberals painted of Trumpettes is false — they’re all misogynistic, homophobic racists — the hysteria is real, and that causes people to react with violence against whatever they fear. Those violent reactions become very real horrors that are not just painted in the imagination, and they divide the nation deeper, creating  fears that are now based on real horrible events that came about due to the original false beliefs. It’s like a panic attack that feeds on itself.

And the more people continue to believe the caricature that liberals created out of Trump supporters and then react in fear to that caricature, the more real-life bad events will create real horrors. It can quickly become a self-fueling social vortex that all began from false fears.

Liberals have for months been retelling each other every day that Trump supporters are all bigots, homophobes, xenophobes and misogynists. They painted Trump supporters with a broad crimson-stained brush as being entirely motivated by hatred. On one level, I’m sure they created this image of the Trumpettes in order to win the election — by making making them look like the KKK fan club, which no decent person would want to belong to.

There is, however, a deadly downside to this kind of demonization: you cannot do it unless you also convince yourself that the stereotype you are creating is true — otherwise you’d live in the knowledge that you are a liar. Nobody wants to live in the knowledge that he or she is a liar, and it is simple to convince yourself that the stereotype you are believing is true because that is who you want to simplify the other side anyway.

 

Political correctness kept liberals from seeing how the election would turn out

 

As a result, liberals were shocked, while I was not, that Trump won. They were shocked to discover that they live in a nation filled with haters. (They don’t, of course; but they believe they do, which explains their sudden horror that wasn’t there a week ago. A week ago, they believed Hillary would win by a landslide because they thought (as liberals tend to do) that the majority thinks and feels like they do.

I suspected Trump would win, as I’ve said here, because he was far more likely to have a horde of closet supporters than Hillary was. Why? Because not everyone in this world is brave or politically inclined, even though they vote. And when liberals demand political correctness by demonizing those who don’t stay in those bounds, they simply drive people underground.

When politically correct speech rules the day, those who do not think in politically correct ways and who are not politically inclined decide they’re just not going to talk about who they vote for because they don’t want to have arguments with friends or even lose friends. They don’t want to be labeled as racists for their views when they know they are not racist but don’t know how to prove they are not against such charges.

Thus, when pollsters call them, they say they are undecided when, in fact, they have already decided to vote for Trump. They may do that because they are afraid someone will overhear, and they don’t want to be tarred and feathered. Mostly they do it because they have already decided how how they’re going to vote and have decided not to say not a word about it by simply answering that they are “undecided.” They don’t care about pollsters, nor even like them, so they give them the same stock response. Policing for politically correct speech drives all but the boldest of free-thinking people underground.

That is exactly why America has always supported the ideal of anonymous voting. It’s the only way you can be sure all people will vote for what they believe is right and not simply cast the vote they think will create the least trouble for themselves. Not everyone is brave, and political correctness causes those who are not as brazen as Trump to hide their views. So, I was pretty sure we’d discover Trump had a large number of closet voters that the pollsters can’t sniff out. Trump’s campaign didn’t know he had those voters either; they just hoped they did. The brave supporters, who are outspoken, are readily counted; but the less brave would remain unknown until election day.

Because Trump is boisterous, bellicose and all-around obnoxious, Trump supporters had more reason  to be afraid to say, “I support that guy.” If not for the fact that he was the only guy left in town who was clearly saying he would tear the establishment apart, many probably wouldn’t support someone like that. It also may be that this kind of arrogance is what it takes to have shoulders that are broad enough to knock the establishment apart because you don’t care what others think. They saw Trump as someone who could bear the slings and arrows that would certainly come to anyone who tried to break up the corrupt establishment. Rather than being reviled as horrible human beings for supporting someone like Trump, they just remained silent.

That is how liberals created their own blindness and their own shock and awe as to how this election turned out. It’s really nothing more than a panic attack. I wasn’t surprised by a Trump victory (though the sea of red counties across the nation was more amazing than I thought it might be) because I am quite certain that most Trump supporters are not bigots. They didn’t vote for him because of racists inclinations but voted because they are angry at the establishment, and they want a junk-yard dog who can tear into it.

Because I never believed the stereotype that was created for Trump supporters by the left, I don’t suddenly fear that I live in a nation filled with bigots. As a result, I’m not shocked by the election results nor afraid, even though I didn’t vote for Trump (or Hillary). Nor am I afraid Trump supporters will beat me up for saying that. But liberals are now deathly afraid of the illusion they created. They are running from their own straw man who appears to them to have suddenly caught on fire.

Sure, Trump attracts bigots like a light in the night attracts most bugs. Maybe they make up as much as 10% of Trump supporters, though I doubt it; but because liberals have convinced themselves that all Trump supporters must be that kind of person, liberals are now scared by their own manufactured caricature. In their perception, they have just awakened to the Night of the Living Dead in a world where everyone around them might be a zombie.

 

Trump is his own self-made caricature

 

Trump is a master at playing the media because the media wants to be played, and Trump knows it wants to be played. Trump deliberately avoids all politically correct speech and belts out the most provocative statements he can make because he knows the media will love a story about a celebrity who is peeling the skin off of people’s ears by saying things that are politically incorrect in a world where political correctness has become the highest virtue.

Controversy sells. There is a reason to be provocative if you want your message to be heard. There is a cost, too, because being so provocative makes it hard for many people to trust or respect you. Trump by nature doesn’t care, so he’s the perfect provocateur.

The media knows they’re being played. You hear them mentioning it from time to time as if they speak about “the other guys” in the media, but notice they are covering the same story the other guys are about the latest ostentatious thing Trump said while they make their statements that Trump is playing the media. Why? Because they don’t care either. It makes a hot story that sells. By talking about how Trump is playing the media, they can rise above being played themselves while selling the same blisteringly hot story.

Trump knows all of that.

So, Trump says things like “we need to keep out Mexicans who are rapists,” and the media and liberals start chattering among themselves about how Trump believes all Mexicans are rapists. I note, as the chatter takes off, that he didn’t actually say “Mexicans are rapists.” He said we need to keep out any that are. (That may be only 1% of Mexicans that he wants to keep out, and why wouldn’t we want to keep out convicted rapists, whether they are Mexican or any other nationality?)

Trump lets the story play the way the media casts it because it gets coverage all over the nation for days on end, and his supporters see that he doesn’t cower from it. He goes right out for the next outrageous statement to kick the hornets nest again. They want someone with guts, and he’s showing them he has that.

Nor did Trump ever say he has grabbed a woman by the crotch. In fact, he actually said he struck out with seducing the one woman he was talking about. He said celebrities can get away with outrageous actions. He did not say it is good behavior or that he has ever done it. (Notice, he switched from saying “I” to saying “you” at that part of the conversation.)

He deliberately named the most outrageous thing that popped into his head because celebrities DO get away with that. We’ve all heard stories about how mobs of women throw themselves at rock stars and say, “Take me!” They rip off their own blouses at concerts and get on people’s backs to make sure the celebrity can see their bare breasts bounding above the crowd. There are some who, if a rock star grabbed them the way Trump described, probably would jump up and wrap their legs around him and say, “Bring it on, Big Boy!”

So, we know it happens. (Not with most women, for sure, but enough to keep the limited number of rock stars happily busy.) And that is PROBABLY all Trump was really saying: “Since celebraties get away with the worst imaginable things, I was surprised I couldn’t even seduce this woman by offering her a shopping spree to furnish her apartment. She was having none of it.” That doesn’t leave him as a good guy, but it probably wasn’t as horrible as the story was made out to be by those who wanted to use it to defeat Trump.

Trump routinely says things in reckless ways, and while that works great for publicity, it may prove damaging as a president. It certainly grabs the press by the crotch, which the press seems to like. Like the kind of woman I described above, they say, “Take us! We want to go for the ride” … and Trump obliges. Trump’s provocative speech gets endless replay by the press, so he doesn’t immediately correct himself because that would defeat the purpose in being provocative. (It’s also against his nature to correct himself.) A lot of it may be because he’s reckless, but it worked for him as a candidate. How well it work as a president is an entirely different manner, but it appears to me he realizes that and has immediately toned it down.

Is there anyone in this country that really wants to import rapists from Mexico … or from Russia … or from Canada or any other country. Of course not. So, why be upset that Trump says we need to stop importing racists from Mexico … unless you deliberately misread that statement to mean he thinks we need to stop importing all Mexicans because they are all rapists? Liberals jumped to that conclusion because it fit their political aims to believe it. They created the lie and immediately believed their own lie … because they wanted to. But now it leaves them afraid of something that was never real in the first place.

Trump was speaking about an incident where some actual criminals who were illegal aliens raped someone after they were known by the government to be both criminal and illegal aliens. He was saying that we should never allow known criminals into our country from other countries (Mexico or otherwise), and we should always deport aliens if we find out they are rapists. What do we need rapists for? What’s wrong with that? He was pointing out that it is ludicrous that those rapists were still in the country since their illegal status SHOULD make it very easy to get them out.

In a liberal’s world, I guess, removing any immigrant for any reason is bad. We need more rapists. So, don’t dare use their illegal status as a way of getting the problem out of the country. Trump was showing how deliberately naive our nation is regarding corrupt people. He knew it would resonate with a large group that is fed up with the kind of blatant stupidity that says, “We have to keep rapists here because its not right to send them away.”

The majority of people understood what Trump was saying, and that’s why he won. He didn’t bother to clarify it for the rest because the provacative way he said it gave it endless replays, and he knew that his supporters would be glad to see that controversy didn’t cause him to waver. He also knew that the few who really are racists would take it as affirming their racist views and would vote for him because of it, too (and a vote is a vote), while those who mischaracterized it as meaning he thinks Mexicans are rapists would never vote for him regardless. Apparently, a fair number of Latinos understood all of that, too, because Trump doubled the Republican share of Latino votes over what Romney got.

 

Liberal demonization of others creates racism

 

Painting the story in blood by making it sound like Trump believes all Mexicans are rapists is where the real evil begins because people start to believe this demonization and apply it to anyone who would support someone like Trump. As a result, perfectly wonderful Mexicans who live in this country start to fear that everyone who supports Trump is one of those kinds of people who believe Mexicans are all rapists. So, they see a Trump bumper sticker and think, “That guy hates Mexicans.” The tragic part of demonization is not how it hurts Trump or his supporters; it’s that many people are now afraid that all Trump supporters are racists when they needn’t have any such fear.

As this liberal manufactured fear grows, it spreads like a dark fog over the landscape, and when the fog lifts, the ground is sometimes stained crimson as in this story about Black people dragging a White guy out of his car and beating him and dragging him down the road with his car while the whole crowd laughs … just because he  identified himself as a Trump voter — probably had a Trump bumper sticker.

That’s what demonization does. It creates, in this case, a narrative that all Trump supporters (or whatever group is being demonized during that particular season) are evil and hate-filled. Therefore, it is OK to drag them down the street with their own cars after beating them up over and over while laughing about it and taking a video. It no longer matters what you do to these individuals because they are demons who are responsible for all the bad that ever happened to you.

They stop being people and become the are caricatures  you have made of them. And that excuses your own hatred when you act in rebellion against them. (We do the same thing in war to make it easier to shoot the enemy. If we thought of that soldier in the opposite trench as a mother with children, we might be slow to pull the trigger and, thus, die, ourselves.)

Trump helps create this problem by constantly speaking in language that is easily interpreted in outlandish ways, and he doesn’t clarify what he means because the provocative way he says it is the very thing that gives it air time. Thus, he gets the lion’s share of media attention without paying for any of it. He makes himself a spectacle on their dollar (and makes a lot of money for them by giving them a story, so they don’t care). That’s how it works.

But now we need to recognize the demonization for what it is AND the way Trump’s speech deliberately plays with that fire, and we need to back it down; or we’ll go down the vortex where our fears create our reality by causing real horrible acts that should be feared. Let’s start with undoing the stereotype that has been created.

 

What does a true Trump supporter look like?

 

The fact also is that most of these Trump supporters who were reviled are no more vile than are Hillary’s supporters. They are just baking apple pies and setting them on the window sill, chatting about Kim Kardashian, and putting Halloween costumes on their children. And they are not racists for one second of their lives. They are not afraid of other cultures (xenophobic). They don’t hate people who are homosexual, even though they might feel uncomfortable around them because that isn’t their norm.

They’re just living their lives because they are not as political as many liberals, who may wrongly assume that everyone is as political as they are. These quieter Trump supporters that swung the election aren’t that interested in politics so they don’t talk about politics. They are more interested in turning the garden under for winter.

You don’t have to hate Mexicans or anyone else to decide that you liked life better when you could afford to buy a house (which most Americans cannot any more) and could afford to buy a new car every four years, even while paying much higher interest than you do today.  Because liberal Democrats have tried to paint these immigration concerns, as I’ve written about in another article today, as racism or xenophobia for years, the middle class finally rebelled because they finally had a candidate who didn’t care about political correctness.

Donald Trump was the only person left speaking for those who have been shut out of good-paying jobs with great benefits the Reagan days onward by both Democrats and Republicans. Bernie had already been sidelined.

While seeing their own lifestyle slowly diminish, middle-class Americans watched banksters get fabulously wealthier, and Obama did nothing about it. No one was brought to justice. Republicans supported bailing them out because they were too big to fail, but then Republicans never did a thing to make them smaller afterward so that we wouldn’t face that threat again. Democrats bailed the wealthy out for the same reason and then let them get bigger and wealthier so all the more too-big-to-fail.

Trump rose as the anti-Republican Republican, and the middle class needed an anti-Establishment hero because the corporate establishment owns both parties. So, he won, and any liberal or conservative who is sick of the Wall-Street establishment should HOPE he succeeds in doing that one thing — busting up the establishment’s hold on government and should support him in that mission because it is likely to be your only chance to bust up the establishment, short of its own complete failure into anarchy, which will be violent for everyone.

 

Moving on beyond hatred

 

If you hate everyone who simply wants to gain back the middle-class life that their parents once enjoyed or that THEY once enjoyed, then you are going to have a lot of people to hate. Since you don’t want to be a “hater,” you will paint all of them with a broad brush as being the haters, themselves, while you are just defending the defenseless against them. That way you can nobly hate half of America, and write their concerns off with one word — racism — while you hold your head above the masses.

Problems don’t go away because you deny them. Denial actually creates new problems or makes old ones worse. Trump’s supporters have revolted now because no one was listening to them, and they’re not going away now that they have finally awakened and started fighting for themselves. They chose Donald Trump as their strongman leader because he was brazen enough that he didn’t care what the entire world said about him. He has many characteristics that most Trumpettes don’t like either, but he is still the only person who stood up for them and who survived the establishment’s efforts to put him back in his place, which Bernie did not survive.

If you’re a liberal, you can jump in your yacht and try to find an uninhabited shore in Canada to land on, or you can scare yourself to death with the notion that 50% of America is suddenly a bunch of violent, xeno-homo-phobic, redneck bigoted haters -or- you can throw away the stereotypes and start dealing with reality, which is that the middle class will now fight the establishment tooth and claw in order to gain back the jobs and benefits and lifestyle that eroded out from under them for thirty years. Whatever one makes of Hillary’s politics, you have to admit she represented the establishment, while Trump became the sole survivor representing the dis-establishment.

That  means stopping the demonization that says immigration concerns are about racial hatred or xenophobia. That’s a convenient stereotype to shut off all discussion. Sure, there is a small mob of people for whom it border security and tightly controlled immigration is all about hatred; but that doesn’t explain the massive sea of red counties that spread across the political map on the second Tuesday of November. It is completely rational to believe that determined terrorists might be smart enough and opportunistic enough to hide themselves among 500,000 unknown, illegal immigrants each year. If we don’t know who those half million people are, how can we know there are not 10,000 terrorists among them? We need to KNOW.

Trying to caricature the masses into a comically grotesque bunch of “Deplorables” is only going to flood your own world with true hatred and violence because people believe that caricature and strike out against the “Deplorables” who then strike back. A part of racism is in perception. Perception becomes reality because we respond to the world with an intensity that is based on our perception, and our response becomes the next person’s reality and becomes self-inflating.

If, for example, we perceive people like Trump’s supporters as being racist who are really just sick and tired of becoming poorer, then we’ll interpret their actions, such as their Trump bumpersticker, as being racist. We’ll feel slighted by a bumper sticker – by what we interpret as their display racism. We’ll see their statements that they want less immigration as being all about race, even if it truly is all about jobs or about their fear that the borders are not being watched carefully enough to keep out the few people who genuinely want to bury us in mass graves.

When you start seeing people in that crimson hue, you’ll start to fear them more; and they’ll perceive that you act differently toward them because of your fear, and they’ll start to fear you more. Then they act differently toward you because of their fear. False, demonizing beliefs quickly wind up into a vortex mass hysteria.

Perhaps the worst kind of Xenophobia there is is the kind that fears half of our neighbors as being from another planet, not just another culture. We have a few people like that who now want to carve the west coast off of the rest of the country, showing themselves to be just as deeply isolationist as the people they angry at for being so isolationists!

 

How do we bring a divided America together again?

 

If we can take the demonization back out of politics now and deal with the real concerns that are eating our society — the concern about lower-paying jobs and fewer jobs because jobs are being deported, drastically reduced benefits, the end of the middle class to the benefit of the top 1%, justice against those who truly did rape society — then  maybe we can get through this.

We need to stop thinking about whether something is Republican or Democrat but about how we can serve and protect the middle class or we’ll simply wind up with a greater number of lower-class people all around us. The rich will always have enough.

The elephant in the room is awake now. So, either deal with it, or live in fear of it because it is definitely not going away. The one thing Donald Trump has done for all of us is become a lightning rod that woke the sleeping giant — the middle class. In the end, going back to policies that build the middle class can be good for all of America, and the rich will still be rich at the end of the day.

Whatever party you belong to, stop it! The two-party systems has polarized the nation purely for the survival goals of each party.

For conservatives, that means stop worrying about the need to take care of the rich so they can trickle down jobs to you. That hasn’t worked after thirty years, and it never will. That means the Trumpettes need to start with making it clear immediately that the Donald’s trumped-up, trickle-down tax plan is over before it even begins. He may have the guts to break up the establishment, but that plan feeds everything toward the establishment.

Use the advantage of your numbers to make sure ALL of the tax breaks go directly to the middle class and the poor. Stop believing the nightmarishly repeated lie that money will ever trickle down or that all jobs are created by the rich. The bulk of jobs are created by small, middle-class-owned businesses all cross the nation.

It’s time for the rich to pay their fair share in taxes. Don’t believe the Republican establishment lie that the rich pay more than their fair share already. They don’t. Yes, the wealthiest 20% of the people pay 75%  of the taxes, which sounds like they are doing far more than their share. However, that is only because they make more than 80% of all the wealth in the country — a number so obscene it is hard to comprehend. Therefore, they should be paying 80% of the taxes. Moreover, the 1% make about 60% of all that wealth and pay a smaller percentage in taxes than the middle class! So, don’t fall for a third round of trickle-down economics.

You won’t get what you need if you don’t fight for it, and Trump has already started to make the mistake of surrounding himself with establishment advisors. Maybe he knows what needs to happen but doesn’t know how to do it and is looking for advice from the wrong people, or maybe he was the establishment’s Trojan horse in the first place — someone to take the heat of imminent economic failure while still being certain to support the rich.

Either way, don’t let it happen. Force him into being the hero he has set himself up to be. Don’t think your job is done just because you voted. The job has only now begun. And while you’re at it, don’t forget to look out for the underprivileged. Their needs don’t end just because we are finally going to start making the great middle class great again.

For liberals, just consider all that I’ve said above, and stop doing the demonization, start looking to find common ground on areas of immigration concern where it has more to do with how it affects the job of the neighbor you love and more to do with how to be wise about terrorism. That doesn’t mean the doors are slammed shut, but you ought to be able to focus on the common ground and work with accomplishing what can happen there. You just may find the things that bind us together are greater than the things that alienate us once we stop demonizing the other side and seek common ground.

 

Let me close with a comment by Chris MacIntosh when he predicted Donald Trump’s election because he believed the left is blinded by their own political correctness:

 

When only right-wing demagogues are prepared to say what a politically correct establishment is unwilling to say, then it will be right-wing demagogues that are elected to power. (Capitalist Exploits)

 

 

14 Comments

  1. Ping from QEternity:

    The “liberal media” has established their own Borg-like following. Too bad many of these millennial have zero interest in paying for actual media content. It’s the ‘old folk’ who will pony up, and now half of them know said media outright detests them.

    Note to MSM: good luck with that.

    Youngsters are not consumers of anything that isn’t digital besides clothes and food. Lots of ad revenue is going to twinkle away when ‘red America ‘ decides the ONLY media they can trust is FOX — which in of itself is not the best way to get a well rounded view of the world.

    The other day the NYTimes did a ‘mea culpa’ — probably too late.

    It’s going to be an interesting 4 years.

    • Ping from Knave_Dave:

      I agree. It has been particularly pathetic to watch the mainstream media’s coverage of the violent reaction against Trump’s victory.

      Yesterday, ABC reported on the fact that violence was happening, but asked if Trump was going to rein in his supporters. Wow! I believe most of the violence they were reporting APPEARED to be carried out by Hillary supporters against Trump supporters. They mentioned that in it was against a Trump supporter in once case, but then made it look like most was being done by Trump supporters with no evidence to support that, and they didn’t ask if Hillary was going to rein in her supporters.

      Like your say, FOX is far from a balanced perspective, too, though it does, at least, provide some balance to the liberal media. Still, it is straight establishment Republican, MASSIVELY mixes commentary in with news, while criticizing other media for doing the same thing, though Fox does it far more egregiously.

      There is no network on television that seems neutral or balanced AND investigative. Investigative journalism, even among papers, seems dead. They take what is fed to them.

  2. Ping from Aaron:

    I agree with what you’re written here for the most part.

    However, both sides have created jabberwockies of their opponents. Conservatives demonize people who vote for Democrats as safe-space loving, race-monging, Marxist college professors. Really, the continuation of the “Massachusetts liberal” caricature that we heard back in the 1980s. That stereotype is no more helpful than the confederate flag waving deplorable racist. The perisistence of both is a large part of the problem with our country.

  3. Ping from Broos:

    It IS the Revolt of Teh ILLEGAL$, enabled by the Purple Diaper Babies’ NAPPYS (No Account Precedents and Party of You’re Screwed); firmly affixed with their cognitively dissonant “safety” pins.

  4. Ping from C.R. Mudgeon:

    Ummmm… isn’t telling “liberals” that they can all jump in their yachts and take off a wee bit prejudicial? Many, many liberals are working class. So if you are going to ask us to stop the hyperbole, I’d suggest you stop being a hypocrite and we’ll see if we can work something out.

    Otherwise a worthy, if wordy read.

  5. Ping from Pam Potter:

    In your paragraph – “For liberals, just consider all that I’ve said above, and start doing the demonization…” shouldn’t the word ”start” be replaced with “stop”?

  6. Ping from SovereignDemos:

    You nailed it. BRAVO!

    • Ping from Knave_Dave:

      Well, I was probably wrong if I said “primary.” And they are certainly all of those other things you mention, but I think we need to toss aside the very tired and worn-out notion that giving the largest tax breaks again and again to the rich is ever going to trickle down to the poor and also to be clear that the rich do NOT pay the highest share in taxes because they make most of their money on capital gains, which is already taxed lower than regularly income.

      • Ping from SovereignDemos:

        For what it’s worth to you, we all do better when we resist the temptation to look into other people’s pockets. Plus, classifying people based on “class” is a Marxist invention and its use, however convenient in identifying what may motivate people in similar economic circumstances, can lead us into rhetorical perils. Either the principles of private property apply equally to all, or they don’t; and who by what right shall lay claim to the moral authority to decide the right amount of equal?

        One of the greatest “trickle down” economic success stories, often over looked and ignored by so many, is the muni-bond market. Think about. The economic benefit of muni’s sure doesn’t square with this statement: “For conservatives, that means stop worrying about the
        need to take care of the rich so they can trickle down jobs to you. That
        hasn’t worked after thirty years, and it never will.” I don’t know, 3.7Trillion is an awful lot of investment into our local economies. It help’s to clarify our thought when we don’t get tripped up by over politicized tag lines like “trickle down.”

        Thanks for the blog.

        • Ping from Knave_Dave:

          Classifying people based on class came along thousands of years before Marx, so it is far from a Marxist invention. It’s been the way the world has run through most of history … or at least parts of it. However, I’m not at all interested in classes of PEOPLE, as I don’t like seeing the world divided into classes. I use the term only to talk about how different levels of wealth are treated differently under our tax code. So, in other words TAX CLASSIFICATIONS based on IRS code, which creates different levels of tax for people with different kinds of income, not merely with different amounts of income, and it is the creation of different preferential taxes for different KINDS of income that I am most interested in because that really is a class-oriented way of thinking — that the person who makes his money this way should be treated differently from the person who makes her money that way.

          For those who make their money through very little effort by just investing in stocks, a special tax is created. If you want to be egalitarian (as I do), you would tax capital gains income exactly like other income.

          Nor am I interested in what motivates people when it comes to the taxes we charge. I’m interested in seeing that the wealthy are not made into a separate class within the tax code that gets preferential treatment. So, I am sick and tired of the establishment Republican argument that the rich are being overtaxed. It’s an outright lie. The tax code DOES treat wealthy people as a privileged class by giving them capital gains tax relief and numerous write-offs, credits and loopholes that apply predominantly to wealthy people. Sure, poor people can and do buy and sell some stocks, usually just within their 401k retirement plans, however, which doesn’t do anything for them now. Most cannot afford to play in the stock market casino, and I think it highly unfair that casino gambling is treated as an activity that is worthy of special treatment.

          There are many wealthy people for whom stock investing and real estate investing is their predominant method of making income, and I am saying that by giving that KIND of income preferential treatment, we are doing something that results in the wealthy paying a lower percentage of their income in taxes than many others who make a lot less. That needs to end. We should not be selecting out the kind of income that applies mostly to the wealthy and giving it preferential treatment. Cap gains tax breaks do not create jobs. The create enormous speculation in housing and stock markets that leads to huge bubbles. Even if it didn’t create any bubbles, it is unfair to give preferential treatment to one kind of income over another.

          It’s been done with the argument that it will trickle down to others. It doesn’t because it doesn’t create jobs. The money saved on gains is reinvested into the market. When those stocks are sold, the money saved on those gains is reinvested into the market. When those are sold, the money saved on gains is reinvested into the market. In other words, it just keeps a lot more money in play in stock speculation, making the wealthy who can afford to take such risks wealthier at a faster rate. It doesn’t cause factories to be built, giving jobs to people with less income. It does NOT trickle down, and the proof of that is thirty years of stagnant wages and declining benefits.

          I also don’t see municipal bonds as having anything to do with trickle-down economics.

          • Ping from SovereignDemos:

            I agree with so much of what you’ve outlined. Simple solution: Don’t tax labor – Repeal the 16th – and tax consumption. The devil would be in the details of how consumption would be taxed.

            • Ping from Knave_Dave:

              That is exactly where I am going with this, too. The United States began with consumption taxes and no income tax, and it needs to go back to that. However, congress loves income tax precisely because it gives them thousands of control levers to use to steer both the economy and social issues by what you exempt and what you don’t.

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