DonkeyCigars

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CNN hitting on some smart insights: - White swing voters are susceptible to potent, social issues - Dems cannot consistently court black voters - The culture is moving very quickly; white voters have anxiety about a changing America that is blacker and browner and people who didn't always have a say now have a say.

I think you missed this part of his post "I send my kids to private school because locally that is the best option and we have to make decisions based on what’s beat for our kids long-term." I know your kids are older, from what I remember of your posts, and not sure if you even had to wrestle with the pros/cons, benefits/risks, but it's a real problem these days.

Same.

Same.

I assume you are speaking generally and more royally here as I over-rotate and don't watch any media at all, outside of sports, children's shows on various streaming channels and movies on airplanes.

Thanks for posting this. I understand this better and you and your position better. I'm more or less sold and with you. It feels like we (America) have a fundamental misalignment and need to have the hard conversation about what outcomes we want and what outcomes we can afford. What are the table stakes, what are the outcomes that we must have and what are nice to haves, etc. I mentioned in another post but the biggest issue is we don't have shared definitions for these things and we absolutely have to be singing from the same sheet of music or we will continue to have this noise...this cacophony and din of misalignment. If we don't find a way to take a step back and do this, we will never get healthy consensus and it will be an antagonistic political pendulum as it has been.

To what extent are those property taxes being passed along? How are we accounting for that? I'm not saying you are wrong-- I think landlords will pass along as much as the market will allow and that they should if they are in the business of optimizing value-- but not being a tax professional I'm not sure what the mechanisms are to account for this outside of just fuzzy logic.

I think we need to add a time horizon of age. $2mm in wealth for a 30 year old is upper class family wealth. You have your prime earnings years ahead of you and are poised to even more wealth. Plus the person on this side of the x-axis has not paid as much in taxes (paid his dues) but for a likely short amount of time (versus the old man who has paid in for 40+ years). $2mm in wealth for a 55 year old who is hanging up the cleats: you have $80k a year over to live off of if you live another 25 years (80 years old). That puts you solidly in the middle class, even after you account for any other retirement benefit ($3k more a month in social security, etc.)

Thanks for the translation; that makes sense and I agree is a problem. I think the biggest issue is we don't have a shared working definition of these three terms: "Rich", "Middle class" and "Poor". We have a myriad of different perspectives, experiences and when taken with the concept of relativity, we have a very confusing tableau of policy talking points and goals. If we could create a single source of truth style definition for these things I think we could make progress because my experience tells me that a large enough bloc of folks agree with the "what" of needing to tax billionaires or ultra-rich more, but disagree on the "how" and where the lines are drawn.

I think one of the obvious results of the human condition (of which you eloquently stated in a single sentence above) is that people identify more readily with people who look or sound like themselves. It's why being an empath is so difficult and such a higher order form of feeling/being/thinking and it's why "representation matters", as I understand it. And I would hope it would be illuminating to you because I literally and specifically shine an industrial strength spotlight when I say "hey, this could be my grandfather so I have a soft spot. Heck it could be me one day." And I say that to appeal to the better sides of some on this thread whose instinct is to react in spite/hate/scorn instinctively, to pause and reflect and consider if they could have similar sympathy considering a lot of us look and sound and have similar shared and lived experiences. Maybe this guy is an unwilling victim and worthy of sympathy; maybe he's not. Ultimately you decide how you want to feel about and react to a video of someone on the internet. I appreciate Bolverk for sharing a personal side in that regard. God bless your mom, B.

I have no idea what the bold is saying and I've read it three or four times. I guess like Tom Hanks once said, I'm not a smart man. The only thing I have to say in response to your post is that I agree that ultra-wealthy need to pay more. I also think a nebulous term like "middle class" is probably a source of confusion because in my previous post I mention how a 55 year old person who has worked (and paid taxes) the majority of his life and has been able to earn and save 2-3mm bucks is solidly middle class. He is not rich or wealthy and punitively taxing someone like that is a squeeze play, as I was reading a thread where the "surly libz" were talking about $2mm being the baseline to start these ultra-rich taxings (literally a poster put the cut off at $2mm lol)

I guess I don't understand how, when speaking specifically about tax treatment, how you can say in one breath that the middle class get better tax treatment (with the implication that "better" still means crappy) and then in the next say poors are are largely excluded from the IRS/income tax and property tax by virtue of not owning property. What taxes are the poors being victimized by? Sales tax? Unfair sin taxes because poors are more likely to smoke cigarettes or something? I'm not all the way following.

Yea, okay and fair. But what is also fair is that in the same very post, I admitted that was my first impulse and instinct. I also said that I actively have worked to fight that first instinct and to rise above it. Go back and read that part; I said there was something ugly in me (and others) that needs to be confronted. It's the difference in awareness and attempting to grow versus just doing the same ole song and dance without trying to ascertain the root causes of things and just mocks and derides. Which, by the way, I'm not here trying to shame anyone for mocking this guy, I'm just giving my opinion that that clip is illuminating, to me at least, something deeper and more broken.

I don't know if this was directed at me because of my post on the previous page, but I never said the middle class has it overall worse than the poor. Clearly that is not the case. The middle class has a way worse tax situation (subject of this thread) and, when compared to the wealthy and the poor, the absolute worst net gain of their value and monetary reward for their mutually agreed upon value and contributions to business, society and the market. It's not even close. The middle class is subsidizing this country and it feels like some people's response to that is, "well if we take even MORE from the middle class maybe we can bring the poor up a rung or two and bring the middle class down a rung or two", which strikes me as a middle class example of what people say when they say "I can't believe the poor votes against their own interests". All we are doing in that above example is creating a massive bifurcated voting bloc of poor/middle class and rich, instead of a dynamic sliding scale of income and class where you can move forward or back, without government's intervention/help/blocking, based upon your ingenuity, will, risk tolerance, and luck, and within the span of a single lifetime. The American Dream, baby.

Agreed, I had an encounter with Longhornfan_68 last week wherein he probably responded too quickly and too aggressively in his haughtiness but was clearly wrong in a "plain-as-your-nose" factual and logical way. We've all been there if we've posted on message boards long enough, so there would have existed graciousness for a quick owning up of "my bad, I was wrong, but let's continue the conversation forward around the other points I think you are wrong/stupid/whatever in". But no, because we all exist in each other's minds on a message board and some folks like him aren't really interested in having collaborative discussions and conversations that build upon a back-and-forth, he doubles down and embarrasses himself with some mumbled combination of attempting to shift the goal posts and dismiss my calling him out with "I don't have time right now to explain". I guess I share this to say, I too am amazed at the general unwillingness of some folks to admit when they are wrong about factual and logical things-- not even opinions. And it's to the detriment of our community and a microcosm of the problems with society at large.

Agreed. I think this is because the medicine prescribed to these old feeble men who are scared to death is to watch 8 hours of this specific channel with these specific talk tracks because they will make you feel better about the chaos and speed of the world around you as your old brain deteriorates away. It's akin to giving someone a hard drug to treat chronic physical pain to mask the pain because there is no cure, until they die. But this pain is mental/emotional from being lost in the world. That's my feel, at least, just an opinion and what I see when I see a video like that of a guy who can't articulate what he had for breakfast and can only parrot back a few scripted lines practiced everyday in his recliner before slipping into another fitful midday nap where at least he gets 15 minutes of respite from the scary world of having to drive to Sam's Club to pick up hearing aids or prescription medicine and figure out how to use the scanning feature on his phone he can barely hold.

If I take a step back and read what you said, I agree. Because while you are vilifying this guy for being duped, at the end of the day what you are typing is that he is the victim. He's the victim of Fox News and you don't feel sorry for him (the victim). It's no different than old people being scammed by people who bilk them out of their retirement via gift cards or whatever; it's a scam targeting senior citizens who have lost a step (or a dozen steps) in their mental acuity.

Agree, which is why I said if they had pliable brains that weren't rigid from old age and natural deterioration.

tl:dr: Ultimately, in this guy I see a large population of folks who once held both a valuable position in society (they gave value) and who were also valued by society (they were respected by virtue of their being valuable; a causal value and virtuous cycle) and now that society has moved passed them they are eaten up with fear and insecurity to the point of it being existential and/or border line mental illness. Specifically from this video: When I see that video clip, I'm not immediately moved to derision and mocking and disgust. I see an old, frail and lost man so eaten up with fear and ignorance that he can't even exist with any joy or peace. He's jumping from shadows and is paranoid and scared of something that doesn't even exist. I see a modern day tragedy. That guy could be my pop pop. Heck, that guy could be me one day if God willing I'm liable to live to be ancient. I think that the world has moved ahead, especially with the advancements we've made in technology, and that the cultural norms have changed at warp speed for simple people like this, that they are lost and scared and they are duped. They don't necessarily want to be duped, but they do want to be comforted and have an explanation for why things are so different and scary. I have a soft spot for this stuff I guess because as I said, these people could be my dad (maybe could be our dads, collectively, as white people) and it hits close to home. I want better for them but not sure that at a certain age, outside of smart people with brains that are still soft and flexible, you can be helped.

I thought those two had a recorded call leaked and were beefing. Are they friends again?

I think in our ridicule, we are missing something.

Saw this stat today:

The worst thing that could have happened is to have a viral moment that normalized FJB and turned it into LGB, because now it's exploded. Ball games, signs, bumper stickers, shirts, hats, etc. 10% of GQP would say FJB because it is truly vulgar and NSFW and not family friendly; 100% will say LGB.

The "middle class" has it the hardest of all. The "middle class" is subsidizing this country. The poor contribute nothing and are net takers and the rich contribute, both directly and indirectly, but not in a meaningful way in comparison and to the ratio of the "middle class". And yet it seems some in the middle class wake up and think "cool, I'm being squeezed from both sides, but why not squeeze harder? I don't want to retire or leave a decent inheritance for my children and their children." The answer to doing more for the poor is to tax the rich more. And when I say rich, I mean 10-20-50mm type multimillionaires, not 50-60 year olds with 2.1mm over a career of earning (and paying taxes their entire lives) and saving.