The mood among angry Americans is much more populist than conservative; people are grouchy about those perfidious elites screwing up the country, not taxes in particular.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump seems to becoming more and more of a conventional conservative and less and less populist. Where that will lead I don't know, but it is not likely to be pretty.
4 comments:
Too bad these numbers don't also include feelings about how those taxes ought to be spent. We're starving our education, culture, civic engineering, medicine, and all sorts of other budgets, all so we can keep making ever more bombs and guns.
We've still got a ways before we hit Soviet levels of military bloat and societal neglect, but we're certainly headed down that path. But inequality is going to be pretty firmly on the backburner until Number 45 is out of office, and who knows how further down the road we'll be by then.
About 45% of households pay no income tax. That has to affect how people feel about paying their income taxes, but not necessarily how they feel about how much taxes corporations or the rich pay. Qualifier: I'm sure, depending on criteria, the percentage can be disputed, as any statistic can be. For example, I've seen the 45% percent expressed as "households," "Americans," and something called "tax units."
PS: I have no idea what a unit is, but having come across it, I now feel more like a commodity or maybe an automaton.
"We're starving our education, culture, civic engineering, medicine, and all sorts of other budgets, all so we can keep making ever more bombs and guns."
-As usual, Verloren, you're wrong. Education, culture, medicine, bombs, guns, and all sorts of other budgets are vastly overfunded. Just look at the data. The only one I can clearly see is underfunded is civic engineering, and that's only because I live in Michigan. The USSR had a great deal of military bloat, but to call it socially neglectful is ridiculous to the extreme. And inequality in the late USSR, unlike in the present-day U.S., was very low.
@pithom
I'll happily look at your data, assuming it exists. Toss me a credible citation and we'll see.
Until then, I'll just have a good laugh at the thought that the USSR somehow wasn't socially neglectful. You must be the sort of person who enjoys standing in line for bread due to crop failures, and being permanently evacuated from your lifelong hometown due to radiactive contamination from yet another military blunder.
Then again, I suppose you'd probably just see such calamities as eugenics in action, weeding out the weak, wouldn't you? Anyone who complains is clearly unfit to live in the glorious motherland! They should be shot for sabotaging morale. Soviet equality, where everyone is the same - or else!
Post a Comment