I've been meaning to talk about this for a few days, but with the holiday and all, it kind of slipped through the cracks.
The Republican Party for much the Twentieth Century was supposed to be the Party of the so-called rich. Indeed, it was true to a large extent. The Republicans were always somewhat more business friendly and the Democrats sided more with populist issues. Business groups gave money to the GOP and big labor poured billions into the Democrats coffers. In the 80's, it started to shift as traditional working stiffs saw the result of Jimmy Carter's disastrous economic policies. "Reagan Democrats" came over to the Republican Party in droves and many of them stayed.
Somewhere in the 90s we started electing a Republican majority. We lost it, not so much because of the war, but because the Democrats were successful in painting the Republicans as corrupt. There were a few scandals and many non-scandals. Tom Delay has yet to be convicted of anything and it's doubtful he ever will. Mark Foley never ever committed a crime. Aside from Abramoff (which died down quickly because there were a lot of Democrats that got money from his sources) and the Cunning ham debacle, there wasn't much else of any real consequence and probably less than the Democrats in the same time period. (We'd really like to get to the bottom of Hillary's Chinese connections.) I digress.
Now comes the proof that of a fact that many of us already knew. The Democrats are the party of the rich.
In a state-by-state, district-by-district comparison of wealth concentrations based on Internal Revenue Service income data, Michael Franc, vice president of government relations at the Heritage Foundation, found that the majority of the nation's wealthiest congressional jurisdictions were represented by Democrats
He also found that more than half of the wealthiest households were concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats hold both Senate seats.
In other words, the Party of the people is the party of the RICH people. Pelosi is from San Francisco, one of the wealthiest cities in the USA!
Mr.Franc gives us these statistics as a bit of an insight of the house leadership of both parties:
This new political demography holds true in the House of Representatives, where the leadership of each party hails from different worlds. Nancy Pelosi, Democratic leader of the House of Representatives, represents one of America's wealthiest regions. Her San Francisco district has more than 43,700 high-end households. Fewer than 7,000 households in the western Ohio district of House Republican leader John Boehner enjoy this level of affluence.
The next rung of House leadership shows the same pattern. Democratic majority leader Steny Hoyer's district is home to the booming suburban communities between Washington, DC, and Annapolis. It boasts almost 19,000 wealthy households and a median income topping $62,000. Mr. Hoyer's counterpart, minority whip Roy Blunt, hails from a rural Missouri district that has only 5,200 wealthy households and whose median income is only $33,000.
Of course that is just a comparison between the leadership and it doesn't really mean much by itself. The earlier statistic is the one that tells the tale, but it does show you that when the mantle passed in the last election, the power shifted to representatives from very wealthy districts.
Then there is this:
Over the years, as many middle-class incomes rose, people were increasingly being pushed into higher tax brackets once reserved for only the richest Americans. The largest portion of these taxpayers live predominantly in Northeastern "blue" states dominated by Democrats, who, inundated by constituent complaints, soon began joining their Republican counterparts in pushing to eliminate the AMT.
But the strongest manifestation of the influence that the Democrats' wealthiest constituencies are wielding over party policy came earlier this month as Democratic leaders were considering a proposal to offset revenue losses from AMT repeal by raising taxes on hedge-fund managers, many of whom are major contributors to the Democratic Party.
A "stopgap" bill authored by Mr. Rangel to tax hedge-fund compensation at 35 percent as regular income rather than the current 15 percent capital-gains rate, which passed the House Nov. 9, appears to be going nowhere with Senate Democrats.
Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which has raised tens of millions of dollars from Wall Street financiers and hedge-fund managers, opposes Mr. Rangel's plan. Earlier this month, Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, the chairman of the tax-writing Finance Committee, said the tax increase was a bad idea and could not pass the Senate.
Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the House Democratic Caucus chairman, also has said he wants a stand-alone fix for the AMT without an offsetting tax increase, fearing that any vote to raise taxes now will hurt vulnerable Democrats in next year's elections. More moderate Blue Dog Democrats in the House have also been among the critics of the tax increase.
Some Democrats acknowledge that moneyed interests are exerting a strong influence on their party's agenda and legislation.
"The fact is that [the Democratic campaign committees] have had large contributions from these hedge-fund folks," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal think tank.
"As far as the hedge funds and tax breaks go, the Democrats are clearly getting a lot of money from people who are affected by that, and they're responding," Mr. Baker said.
Mr. Franc draws this conclusion from this:
"Increasingly, we will see Democrats responding to the economic demands of this particular upper-income constituency," he said.
"What the data suggests is that there will be a natural limit to how far and how much the Democrats can sock it to the rich, because in doing so, it means they will have to sock it to their own constituents," Mr. Franc said.
This is what the Republicans need to hammer. Not because we are against lowering the taxes, but exposing the Democrats as they protect the very people they say they are protecting us against.
Hat Tip: Blogs For Victo(R)y
VW
