Fiscal Conservatism Makes Sense
By Ari Kaufman (04/08/06)
I was not an Economics major in college. In fact, I only took one true Economics class - during the first term of my freshman year - and let's just say it was one of the lower grades I attained during my four years of undergraduate study. That admitted, it seems very facile for me to understand how capitalism works, especially as a former teacher who acknowledges that educators in particular are utterly naive to how our nation's economy runs. With tax day coming up this week, this essay is time-relevant if nothing else.
As I have often noted in my writings on this website, we in 2006 are experiencing (and have been since 9/11/01, it seems) a reversal of the 1960s in terms of tolerance and honesty. In this brave new world, it is now Conservative speech that has people full of ire, condemnation, and barricading their collegiate gates so that pro-US, pro-War or even Zionist speakers cannot speak. These turns of misfortune have bled their way down to the fiscal parts of society as well. The Republicans can no longer be deemed the party of the elite. The radical left, and Democrats as a whole, are more educated and far wealthier. It is not Republicans whom I see driving their Mercedes down the streets of Boca Raton on their way to an $8 sandwich at Panera Bread or the oyster bars of Palm Beach. Nor is it Conservatives occupying multi-million dollar houses in Marin County, Marblehead or Mercer Island. Those who voted for President Bush generally do not reside in lily-white, elite communities like Brentwood, California and Chevy Chase, Maryland. And Republicans, although more in favor of vouchers and charter schools than Liberals, do not have the money from their latest directorship to hypocritically send their offspring to the private and gated schools in those areas.
The Left is chock-full of middle-aged doctors, professors, producers and lawyers, groomed to despise Conservatives and authority from their days of comeuppance as students in the 1960s. They may vote along the same lines as the modern day hippies from SoHo, West Hollywood and Asheville; they may even spend an hour walking amongst them at their alma mater's "Diversity Festival" or the art fair at Venice Beach, but they don't want to live near them, and thankfully, the feeling is mutual. The slums and "integrated" schools of the big cities are no place for a rich, Caucasian liberal in 2006. Just don't remind them of that or they will deem you a "racist" somehow. Either that or they'll tell you how hard they worked to get where they are financially.
That is our point exactly, leading perfectly into their flawed argument over economics and "tax cuts for the wealthy."
One of the only, if not the only, statistically based claim of GOP wealth is that a higher percentage of Republicans favor tax cuts than do Democrats. Now, even if you take to heart this supposition, an economic novice like myself can pick it apart, based mostly on reading and the experience of spending most of my 27 years around upper-middle class liberals.
Conservatives, as the media tells us each day, tend to be less formally educated, more often from Middle America, employed in more blue collar jobs and naturally making less money than your average six-figured lawyer in Manhattan. Those Conservatives who work in white-collar jobs tend more often to be in "business," real estate, the financial sector, sales, or self-employed. Essentially, the people that understand money also know how that money works.
That these folks work harder and longer for their money, often times putting what they make right back into their business ventures would not surprisingly lead them to be in favor of keeping a higher percentage of it. It is not racist nor politically incorrect for a factory worker or small business owner to be angered by 30% of their $35,000 per year gross income going back to the Federal Government, to then be "redistributed" to various public programs. Even those who pull in six figures and favor tax cuts generally made that money through innovation and many 60+ man-hour weeks.
It is understandable that these common-sense Americans don't want the unemployed person two towns over to procure a portion of their physically-created capital simply by filling out a form. The few coastal (or Midwestern) elites I know that are fiscally Conservative or vote Republican are more often than not self-employed or in the business/finance world. They are rarely lawyers or academics. And why is that?
While lawyers doubtlessly work long, arduous hours, they are generally rewarded with astonishingly high salaries, approaching half a million or more with longevity in big city firms. With lawyers though, they don't see the intake in their daily work. Having multiple lawyers in my family, the bulk of them see it lumps that come in sporadically, and are distributed through their paychecks at certain intervals, often in huge deposits when cases are settled and paid out. Lawyers surely are part of our competitive, supply-and-demand capitalistic society, but not in the same way a true businessman is. Thus, they have fewer qualms with high taxes.
Let's be honest, too. A lawyer writing an annual $20,000 check to his or her preferred charity, or having that $20,000 taken by Uncle Sam and redistributed over time to the welfare system or housing projects is their preferred way of operation. In this instance, the latter is a write-off, and in both examples they can more conveniently not have to visit the poorer areas of town, yet still claim they "fight for the rights of the poor" and demand tax cuts, chastising those who don't. Ditto for academics and celebrities. Signing a check and then bragging (celebrities) or writing (academics) about the "injustices" of the world is much more to their liking than actually getting their hands or cars dirty. It is easy to be taxed, write a check and then avoid seeing or going into the "bad" areas they "love" to say they "support" so long as Mike and Marcia Democrat aren't forced to leave suburbia and see these poor people face to face. As long as they can brag, and have evidence to back up this "support," they are content.
What has always irked me about the modern PC-infatuated left is their double standards. How is it that just as a black person cannot be racist, poor people, at least in their urban surroundings, cannot be white in the eyes of our big city media? A trip to your local farming community (sometimes as close as an hour ride from your picket-fenced suburb in New York, Florida or Pennsylvania) might open your otherwise closed (educated) mind.
As this Washington Post article(1) shows, the coastal elites have no idea (nor do they care) what people are about in 35 of our 50 states, nor why and how they could vote for George W. Bush. The Post piece is a nice effort to at least travel to see a different part of America, but the condescension and arrogance is unmatched. It is on display from the title to the anecdotes about how few "minorities" there are in rural Utah, all the way to the final lines whereupon they quote an innocent, hard-working woman that says with respect to Bush, "I don't think there's anything he could say that would make me dislike him."
As if the elites in the Maryland suburbs outside of Washington would not have said the same about Bill Clinton ten years ago.
(1) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/30/AR2006013001608_pf.html
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