The Wall Street Journal is warning Democrats that touting an economic theme that shouts "class warfare" could come back to haunt them in November. The Journal piece, written by Deborah Solomon, references Democratic U.S. Senate challenger Claire McCaskill:
Here's the lede:
WENTWORTH, N.C. -- Many Democratic politicians, shrugging off lessons of recent political history, see this as the year when the widening gap between the rich and the rest of America will help win them votes.
Then, later . . .
Other Democrats -- including Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow in a tough re-election fight and Claire McCaskill in her challenge to Missouri incumbent Republican Sen. Jim Talent -- are sounding similar themes: The U.S. economy is growing, but the poor and especially the middle class aren't benefiting. The rich are. And President George W. Bush and a Republican Congress are to blame, they argue.
It's a risky bet. Government data do show an unambiguous trend toward a widening gap between the rich and everyone else, a trend that pre-dates Mr. Bush's election in 2000. And yet U.S. electoral history is littered with Democrats who tried to use the inequality issue only to find voters unswayed and Republicans accusing them of "class warfare" or business-bashing.
"The language of income distribution and income inequality is rarely effective in American politics," says political scientist William Galston, a domestic-policy adviser in the Clinton White House now at the Democratic-leaning Brookings Institution. While Americans may be unhappy that the rich are getting ahead while they're not, most still aspire to be rich and are turned off by candidates who demonize wealth, he says.
"There is little doubt that there has been a 25-year trend of a growing gap, sometimes called income inequality, between the wages of the skilled and the unskilled," says Edward Lazear, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. "While that trend shows no obvious signs of abating in the near future, by some measures inequality has slowed a bit in recent years."
2 comments:
Want to watch the economy explode with growth?
Repeal the 16th Amendment and institute the FairTax.
This would also have the added benefit of putting thousands of IRS employees on the unemployment rolls; they could then go on and get respectable jobs, and regain their souls in the process.
I'm not talking privatization of the IRS... I'm talking dismantling the beast, giving the IRS employees their walking papers/pink slips/termination notices/severance pay/et cetera, and burning the 16th Amendment and that un-Godly mess known as the income tax.
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