If you brought back either of the Roosevelts—Teddy or
Franklin—from the grave, the most astonishing thing they would find is that the
“malefactors of great wealth” have become the benefactors of today’s
liberalism, and Democrats have become the party of the rich. In the economic
crisis of the 1930s, the rich hated FDR. Most of today’s rich love Barack
Obama—so much so that Washington D.C. area airports ran out of space to handle
all of the private jets flying in the well-heeled for both of his inaugurals.
Forget the “limousine liberals” of the 1960s and 1970s, sending their own kids
to private schools while advocating forced busing for everyone else; behold
today’s burgeoning class of “Gulfstream liberals,” who jet about the globe
while fretting about global warming.
What accounts for this astonishing state of affairs,
and what does it mean for our politics in this age of supposed concern over
economic inequality?
To be sure, labor unions (along with trial lawyers)
still provide the majority of the Democratic Party’s campaign funds and
organizational muscle on election day, but it is the super rich of Silicon
Valley and Wall Street, combined with the super rich of Hollywood, who command
the priority attention of Democratic Party leaders these days. Of the ten
richest zip codes in the U.S. eight gave more money to Democrats than
Republicans in the last two presidential cycles. President Obama doesn’t go to
union halls to host fundraisers; he goes to posh Wall Street townhomes, the
Hollywood hills, or to Tom Steyer’s house in Pacific Heights. Steyer, a billionaire
investor and wannabeGeorge Soros, is the perfect model of today’s rich liberal,
and shows where the balance of power on the Left rests today. Organized labor
wants the Keystone pipeline built; Steyer, who imbibes deeply the green Kool
Aid, is adamantly against Keystone. Note who Obama is siding with.
Yes, but haven’t many of the leading plutocrats, such
as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, embraced higher income taxes? Yes, they have,
but one important fact has escaped notice: higher income tax rates will not
touch the bulk of the fortunes of today’s plutocrats, for the simple reason
that the great bulk of the accumulated wealth of Gates, Buffett, Silicon Valley
and Wall Street consists of appreciated asset values—not ordinary income. Few
seem to be aware that most of this wealth has never been taxed, and in the case
of Buffett and Gates, who are taking advantage of the charitable foundation
laws, will never be taxed. Even a return to Paul Krugman’s nirvana of 90
percent marginal income tax rates of the 1950s would do little to reduce the
wealth gap in the nation.
At a time when the Democratic Party is moving
leftward, away from Bill Clinton’s relatively centrist economic outlook, what
explains the growth in the ranks of super-rich liberals? (Or, to flip the
Thomas Frank title, what’s the matter with Connecticut?) It is worth noting
that many of today’s leading liberal super-rich are not heirs of fortunes, like
Stewart Mott and various Rockefellers of previous decades, whose liberalism
could be attributed to personal guilt over unearned wealth. Most of today’s
super rich liberals are financiers and entrepreneurs, like Google founders
Larry Page and Sergei Brin. Liberal guilt is not entirely absent from the
mindset of the new rich, as can be seen especially in the mindless mantra that
the rich have an obligation to “give back,” as though they “took” something in
creating wealth by serving the marketplace with dazzling innovations like
computer software and internet marketplaces.
There are several parts to this story, but perhaps the
most significant is the presumption of the new rich today that they’re simply
smarter (look at how fast I got rich?, they think), and today’s elitist,
technocratic liberalism appeals to their superficial intellectual vanity. As a
one-time critic of the new super rich once put it, “they found it hard to
imagine that there might be any social ill that could not be cured with a high
SAT score.” (That critic was Barack Obama, in The Audacity of Hope.)
The dependence—if not slavishness—of Democrats on the
new super rich is best revealed by the dog that isn’t barking in the current
liberal crusade against economic inequality: where is the call for a straight
up wealth tax? Where is today’s Huey Long, who in 1935 proposed that no one
should be allowed to keep any wealth beyond $50 million—or perhaps, he
suggested, only $10 million. Whatever the figure, Long said, “it will still be
more than any one man, or any one man and his children and their children, will
be able to spend in their lifetimes; and it is not necessary or reasonable to
have wealth piled up beyond that point where we cannot prevent poverty among
the masses.”
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