In which I finally googled the Tea Party because I wasn’t entirely sure what its deal was.
I’ve heard some great arguments from intelligent, white, upper-middle class males about how pretty much everything is skewed against them: they’re literally the only segment of society not protected, somehow, from something. Everybody hates them because they’re white, male, and not poor. I can see how that might be a drag, to be forever the bad guy just because you’re succeeding and you’re not somehow handicapped.
That said, this makes me somehow nervous:
The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll released in April 2010. They are wealthier and better-educated than the general public.
Why does this description frighten me? Am I just socialized against rich white men, or do I really happen to think that they’re kinda bad people? Especially when they seem pissed off?
Tea Party supporters’ fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, is rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.
Why should the government be helping the rich? Have we not come to believe that there is something inherently unbalanced about the distribution of wealth on this planet?
The overwhelming majority of [Tea Party] supporters say Mr. Obama does not share the values most Americans live by and that he does not understand the problems of people like themselves. More than half say the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent think that the administration favors blacks over whites; compared with 11 percent of the general public.
They are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people.
I don’t know who these “most Americans” are. Mr. Obama seems to me to share my values, and the values of many of the people I know. Maybe if I were an old, rich, white male I’d feel differently? (Maybe if I had something to lose, I’d be upset if I felt that it was threatened. The nice thing about not having much is that you’re not worried about losing it.)
When did racism become fashionable among rich married white dudes?
And what, exactly, are “the problems” of rich, white, educated men? Why should the government care about them more than the problems of, say, people who are without resources?
Tea Partiers embrace arguments that government should not provide what individuals can provide for themselves. So, police and public safety are acceptable functions of government, but government should not take from one person’s income to provide for another’s health or well-being.
And when Mr. Paul and his Tea Party supporters espouse “constitutionally limited government,” they argue that much of the New Deal, as well as social programs like Medicare that were enacted later, were a gross violation of the founding document. Those ideas may be hard to sell in a general election, even to Republicans. – “Tea Party Movement,” New York Times
The government should not be the vehicle by which poorly-distributed wealth is redistributed. Well, I can kind of understand that:
G’ma is of the opinion that a lot of what we term societal problems are directly due to things like welfare; in the old days, she says, no nice girl got knocked up, because there was no one to take care of her if she did. Such things just weren’t done, because you had to face your family. Now days, you can get knocked up, go on welfare, live in a subsidized apartment… you can move halfway across the country, if you want, and let strangers take care of you. Hence the broken family, she says, and from there a general societal deterioration resulting in a culture obsessed with spending money it doesn’t have on cheap crap it doesn’t need, an inability to save and/or live within its means, and vast armies of homeless with no one to care for them but the government. All of these symptoms are, she believes, directly traceable to welfare programs.
She’s also told me about some of the charities she’s been involved in for fifty or sixty years and how they don’t really do much any more. One used to collect and distribute food to the poor; now they can’t due to various safety laws (food has to be professionally prepared or packaged or it can’t be donated to the poor). With welfare, charity stopped being an individual’s duty and became the government’s job.
Making government smaller, cutting the programs that make it more father than a function, well, it does seem like a good idea. But when I take the World’s Smallest Political Quiz, I’m still a liberal, so maybe I haven’t yet made my peace with that. After all, I’ve always lived in a welfare state and I don’t know any different. (On the other hand, I score 54 – “You are a medium-core libertarian, probably self-consciously so. Your friends probably encourage you to quit talking about your views so much.” – on the Libertarian Purity test.)
I can’t help but wonder if it’s even possible to go back. Furthermore, I’d really rather cut military spending than social programs first. (How does it make any sense at all that the U.S.’s military spending is this fucking high?)
Anyway, in conclusion: I agree that the government is too big. I disagree that it should be more concerned with the problems of rich white men, but only because I’m not a rich white man. And I still can’t believe that people like Sarah Palin and that Qur’an-burning fruitcake get any press at all.
“Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals—that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government—that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government.” – Ayn Rand in “The Nature of Government,†from The Virtue of Selfishness
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
Brilliant. I would point out that G’ma is wrong. Women of her age DID fuck like bunnies just like today. It was when so many of them died due to lack of available care they could afford that welfare was proposed, adopted, and supported by so many. As the population exploded, so did the problem. Can you think of a better use of taxes collected then taking care of the citizens that paid them? Nearly all welfare recipients (over 80%) only use it for 6 weeks or less. And the rest drop out rapidly too.
Those intelligent, wealthy, white men you know need a history lesson and a little perspective before they start whining about how much the deck is stacked against them. It’s untrue, even with the small work we’ve done in the last 50 years to try to eradicate some of their enormous privilege.
I think there’s quite simply a huge ideological difference between those who believe every man (or woman, or what have you) should be out for himself and take care of his own, and those who believe that part of being civilized and building a culture involves taking care of each other, and lending a hand to those who need, when they need. We have managed to build a very unequal society in terms of who has what. Some people, too, might believe in helping those in need, but not through the government. I think that’s all well and good, but for the fact that it creates insular, isolated social groups with little to no awareness of those living outside of their realms.
Also, um, your G-ma has her own perhaps unrealistic notion of what was what. Nice girls did get knocked up, but they often had the money and connections to have it taken care of. And what about those “not nice girls?” It was fine to leave them to fend for themselves, simply because they didn’t have what it took to keep their indiscretions discrete?
I’m babbling now, but I think you bring up some issues that are near and dear to my heart, obviously. And I think most of these Tea Baggers have a limited sense of history and are all too willing to skew what they do know to fit their own needs, which tend primarily to center around not wanting people to take their money. Whatever that even means. We have pretty low taxes as it is and most of it ain’t goin’ to welfare (or education, or health care, or social security, or the homeless)…
I think we could prove with a little research that lots more babies survive now than used to. Maybe they literally did die of starvation and exposure a few generations ago, if born out of wedlock into families that then spurned them? Or maybe pregnancy rates by married/unmarried status? (Like THOSE records would be accurate.)
I don’t know what to think about rewards. I know that I like it when I work hard and get something for it; I know that if I were more concerned with material acquisition I’d have accumulated a lot more stuff and I’d probably feel pissed off if I thought it was going to be stolen from me and given to junkies.
I tend not to subscribe too much to the feminist party line, because in my observation males aren’t rulers: they’re disposable. They built us civilization because we wanted it, and now they really don’t have many rights because we demanded they give them up, AND THEY DID. (If they ever did have the power feminism claimed, they would have used it to never let women go.) They can’t get welfare in a lot of places unless they have dependents, and they die in service and at work all the time, unlike women, who rarely do, and whose main killer – childbirth – isn’t even a fraction as dangerous as it was a few generations ago.
But that’s neither here nor there. I basically have no idea WTF everybody’s so angry about these days. *sigh* -m
To clarify, of course girls were always getting pregnant. But, according to the one 87-year-old I know, “not like they do now.” Her point being that the lack of social censure means we got a lot of babies being born with no familial structure. I’m not old enough to make statements like that; to me, it looks like people make babies left and goddamned right regardless of everything. Freakin’ breeders. Heh.
So, I’m their demo, and by-and-large, their message totally connects with me. It’s just some of the wingnut fringe elements that make the movement less palatable…
Also, I scored a 153 on that libertarian test. And the answers on the smallest political quiz pissed me off because it portrayed a very stupid form of libertarianism.
So, to be clear, I’m for anyone who’s going to start shutting down big swaths of gubmint. My motivations are rooted in a deep hostility for the current organizational mechanism of cultural identity: countries are irrelevant and arbitrary, and the sooner we let go of those petty distinctions, the sooner we can get on with being a better people.
But I digress: I have worked hard in my career. I know some fairly specialized stuff, and can put it to good, profitable use for my employers (and for myself). For that, I am (by all standards) handsomely rewarded. My current salary puts me in the top 1% of earners, and I’ve been in that range for the last decade.
Also, it should be clear: I do not come from privilege. I grew up poor white trash, in a rented apartment, sharing a room with my brother. I paid for college myself. I have managed my spending so that I do not have a lot of debt.
The economy ate my savings. I wish I were in a position to speculate on real estate, as there’s a lot of it floating about, but that is way out of my reach, and the notion of that kind of debt terrifies me right now.
All that being said, HALF of my paycheck goes to government. Not 28%. Not 35%. Not 43%. Half.
This means that, during a working year, the first six months of work I do, I do for the government.
I really am not clear on why.
I have worked to educate myself and acquire skills in such a way, that my reward is to pay more, presumably because I can afford it? I assure you, I can’t afford it. I really could use that money: it would have helped pay for my kid’s educations, or healthcare for my mom, or possibly even some savings.
Let me assure you that even a decade of earning at that level, does not make me “rich”. I am lucky, I have some choices, and I don’t spend much time thinking down the lower levels of Maszlow’s Heirarchy of Needs. (Although I have, and I can without irony attest that it was those experiences that motivates me today.)
I still need to keep a job, I can’t retire to my cabin in the mountains. Considering my earning level, I have far fewer assets than one might expect. I am as locked into the middle class as everyone else. Maybe living the high life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
I don’t begrudge the truly needy of some welfare–but only some.
And I certainly don’t think anyone should go broke because they get sick.
And it might be really difficult to make a meaningful distinction between needy and sick.
But I do feel like there’s too much government, and I don’t feel like I’m getting my $75-150k a years’ worth of government (note that none of the purported “tax cuts for the rich” have ever affected a guy like me).
Maybe the fact of the matter is I don’t need much government–I wish they’d dry up and go away, but they’re a growth business.
Remember when the gubmint mailed out them tax rebate checks a couple years back? Guess who didn’t get one? Why? Because I make enough already? But I paid in way more than those who are cashing checks…meh.
I’m not supposed to notice this shit? I’m supposed to sit back and smile?
Yes, I can afford a tax man. And we can come up with creative ways to knock that down–by like 10-20 percent, when all is said and done. A whole lot of hassle for not a whole lot of reward. Building an entity to run income through means becoming self employed and self employment taxes are notoriously bad. The “dodges” only exist for the super-rich, the rest of us have to pony it up.
So, you might understand how, irrespective of history, a guy like me might begin to get a little pissed off about how everyone else’s problems need to be mine, but no one really seems to give a damn about my problems.
Seems like my best path is to give up my vaunted role in the economy and just go make enough to get by and make art, maybe live off the government tit in some creative way. I tried the fine upstanding contributing citizen approach, and all it seems to have ended up in, is me, getting fucked, and everyone else seeming to work a lot less than I do.
Oh, one more thing: we need to recognize that when we organize our thinking in the “rich white guy” frame of mind, we’re still engaged in racist thinking. What’s the white stuff in bird poop? It’s bird poop, too.
I say this, not to invalidate the frame of mind, but rather to suggest that just because a line of thinking is racist, it isn’t necessarily wrong. The notion of the Rich White Guy seems both accurate and informative. But what else does that mean?
You’re the demographic? Wow. *blink* I had never even thought of that. AT ALL. The world is weird, mang. Thanks for the comment. -m
Keef: I think it’s interesting that there was an article just a few days ago which stated the TRUE tax rate paid by people making $300k to $1m was around 32% (can’t remember where I read it, in the local paper I think). You mention you’re paying 50%, then later, say you could knock that down by 10-20%. So why don’t you? If you took advantage of available tax rules, that would probably bring you down to around 30%. Not to bad considering what most people in other 1st world countries pay in taxes.
It becomes obvious that Liberals are obsessed with race. Conservatives are not. The Liberally biased media slobers all over themselves to paint the TeaParty as a bunch of cry-baby rich white guys. In the mid 1990s they were called “angry white males.” This is what Liberals do; they divide and conquer by painting their opposition as racists when, in fact, Liberals themselves are the real racists. This country was not founded on redistribution of wealth. It was founded on basic human rights and the pursuit thereof. Enslaving generations through welfare programs is the antithesis of that. That is what the Tea Party opposes – no matter what color they are. just my $.02…thanks
The article reports the qualities the Tea Party members gave about themselves; the demographic conclusions, therefore, are not conjecture, they’re facts. Your calling all liberals racists because you don’t like the conclusions drawn by the demographics in the article is a really weird reaction, man.
Statistically, there have to be racists in both camps. It isn’t a quality belonging only to one side; to make a blanket statement that racism belongs only to one camp is sloppy and loses you credibility because it’s so obviously a non-factual, emotional statement.
When depicting Tea Partiers, the media generally shows us a bunch of idiot rednecks with misspelled signs; that (and the linked article) comprises most of what I know about the Tea Party. (What I don’t understand is the movement’s existence in the first place. Want less government? You’re a Libertarian. Duh.)
In my online experiences, I’ve come to believe that Tea Partiers are angry mid-to-upper middle class white people who lack the ability to verbalize what it is that they’re so upset about; when questioned about their slogans and assertions they tend contradict themselves and get even angrier. The party line is generally something about being pissed off about “the unemployment rate” and “the housing crisis,” and then something about how “it’s all the government’s fault.” Then, when you point out that the government failed in its monitoring duties, sure, but that it was capitalism and greed – the greed of borrowers living beyond their means, as well as the greed of entities wishing to profit from this overextension – and not something that “the government” did that crashed the housing market, they generally just resort to personal insults rather than discussion.
Back to racism: doesn’t the Tea Party claim that whole ridiculous “Obama isn’t American and is a Muslim because he’s black” farce? Newsflash: THAT’S racism. Anecdotally: I don’t know of any non-white Tea Partiers. In conclusion: I wish everyone would quit being so fucking MAD about everything; it doesn’t help. And I’m tired of it. Literally. It’s exhausting; so much so that I find it difficult to educate myself on the issues and vote like I’m supposed to as an American citizen. *sigh* -m
From my latest pay stub (note: I withhold at the single rate, with 0 dependents)
Federal income tax: 17% of gross
Social security tax: 15% of gross
Medicare tax: 0.15% of gross
CA income tax: 14% of gross
SUI/SDI: 0.10% of gross
So: Medicare/Unemployment Insurance/Disability — not even one percent of taxes. I REALLY don’t feel these, and don’t begrudge the world these.
Fed + Soc + CA: 46% total.
When I speak about reducing my taxes with entities and various dodges, I mean I can only take 10-20% of the AMOUNT, not the tax rate. 10-20% in tax reduction only means 5-10% of the overall rate. Making an entity, tracking the expenses and disbursements and paying some beancounter to manage it all into a tax reduction equals a lot more hassle than the 10% is worth.
Fundamentally: we are not very highly taxes when one considers the spectrum of taxes across the world. But I still feel like I pay more taxes than I get back in government and services.
And those that think I can afford to pay more taxes, and SHOULD pay more taxes, so the poor can continue to be poor: THEY CAN FUCK RIGHT OFF.
Where are these crafty poor? Anybody know them? Is there some form of investigative journalism centering on them? If so, why not? Would there not be a hella big audience for that?
What I know is that the one time in my life I ever got food stamps, I wanted them for two-three months during a really rough patch. I was so grateful to receive them, even if it was embarrassing to use them. I tried no fewer than six times to get them canceled after I had some income again, but I continued to receive them until the approved benefit ran itself out anyway. – m
Keef, your argument would be more persuasive if you grabbed last years tax returns, added the taxes you paid, and divided by your income. That’s the effective rate. You know as well as I that the percentages of what you pay on your pay stub isn’t what you end up paying next April. There are deductions to your income, earned income credit and the like. And buying a house really reduces your tax load. (In my case, so did conservatively running a business with an inventory, since I could deduct a part of my house as my office).
I’ve done my own taxes for 40 years, and my tax rate was always hovering around 25%, sometimes peaking at around 30%. (At least that was the effective rate after I bought houses). I always paid my fair share and didn’t fudge numbers, just looked at the instructions and used all that was available to my advantage.
I’m not saying you should pay more taxes, I’m just thinking that like many you are over estimating what you actually pay by looking at your pay stubs and not your yearly income tax forms.
Anecdotally: My effective tax rate is around 15%. Each time I’ve figured it, it was because someone had told me that I was “working a quarter or more of the year to pay Uncle Sam,” or that they were paying somewhere between 25 and 50% of their income in taxes. I’ve personally never paid that much, and I always use the standard deduction because I don’t own anything.