[lbo-talk] Re: further adventures in political surrealism

[Marvin Gandall]

I agree that this is another depressing example of "false consciousness",
which I think has mostly do with people believing that tax cuts in these
times offer a more promising  way of improving their take home pay than
fighting for higher pay and improved social benefits. This view is
reinforced both by the decline of working class economic and political
power, and ruling class promotion rather than resistance to tax cuts. The
fact that there may be more than offsetting cuts to social programs doesn't
occur to many working people, or are regarded as something uncertain and far
off whereas well-defined tax cuts promise immediate relief. Some popular
support for tax cuts is also animated by hostility within the working class
towards the poor, especially racial and ethnic minorities and new immigrants
("them") who experience higher than average unemployment and are seen as
disproportionately and undeservedly benefiting from "too high" taxes and
government spending.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>
To: "lbo-talk" <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 15, 2006 4:42 PM
Subject: [lbo-talk] Re: further adventures in political surrealism


> Just read the full paper. Aside from being depressing as hell - basically
> most people are very poorly informed, but it doesn't matter that much
> because they can't connect the dots anyway - it further undermines the
> Kansas thesis, since it shows strong popular support for repealing the
> inheritance tax (therefore there's no culture wars bait-and-switch going
> on). One reason for this strange position: if people think they pay too
> much in taxes, they're more likely to support repeal. People who support
> more government social spending are more likely to support repeal than
> those who don't.
>
> Doug
>
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>>[this is an excerpt from Larry Bartels' paper "Homer Gets a Tax Cut"
>><http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/homer.pdf>]
>>
>>The results of my analysis suggest that most Americans support tax cuts
>>not because they are indifferent to economic inequality, but because they
>>largely fail to connect inequality and public policy. Three out of every
>>four people say that the difference in incomes between rich people and
>>poor people has increased in the past 20 years, and most of them add that
>>that is a bad thing-but most of these people still support Bush's tax cuts
>>and the repeal of the estate tax. People who want to spend more money on a
>>variety of government programs are more likely to support tax cuts than
>>those who do not, other things being equal. And people's opinions about
>>tax cuts are strongly shaped by their attitudes about their own tax
>>burdens but virtually unaffected by their attitudes about the tax burden
>>of the rich-even in the case of the estate tax, which only affects the
>>wealthiest one or two percent of taxpayers. Some of these peculiarities
>>appear to be mitigated by political information, but others seem
>>perversely resilient.
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>