Progressives have suspected for years that working- and middle-class Americans vote for the GOP because they have a deeply unrealistic idea about their real chances of becoming wealthy. We've joked that working stiffs vote for tax cuts and other goodies for the rich because they seriously believe that they're going to be rich themselves someday, and want to make sure those advantages will be there for them, come the day.
To date, this has been just a guess on our part -- but a recent study now proves that this guess was right on the money. The Myth of the Self-Made American is being bolstered by a delusionally optimistic view of just how many people actually make it to the top 3% income level. It's a delusion that affects almost everyone, but particularly those who vote Republican.
Ryan Enos at yougov.com explains the results of a YouGov/Polimetrix poll conducted a few weeks before the recent election. As he explains their findings:
The hot button issue with the tax cuts is whether to renew the cuts for families earning more than $250,000 a year. The wrangling among politicians over this issue seems to mostly involve whether or not earning that amount of money qualifies somebody as wealthy.
What's amazing about the magic number of $250,000 is that, based on responses to a recent YouGov/Polimetrix poll, by and large, Americans have a very distorted view of how many people make that much money.
Any idea what proportion of American families make more than $250,000 a year? Or, to potentially make it easier, any idea what proportion of families in your state make more than $250,000 a year?
Don't feel bad if you don't know—most people don't. The actual number, nationwide is somewhere less than 3% of families earn more than $250,000 a year. What did the survey respondents say when asked this question? The average response was close to 17%!—meaning your typical survey respondent thinks that almost 1 in 5 families in America earn that kind of money, when the answer is closer to 1 in 50!
Enos goes on to point out that there are only a few states where the actual number of $250K earners even cracks 8% -- Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Virginia. But when the question was put to people in those states, they weren't even half right, because their answers tilted upward, to about 21%.
Furthermore: the more money you make, and the more education you have, the more accurate your guess becomes. People making over $150K guessed an average of about 11%; those making under $30K thought it was more like 21%. College graduates guessed 12%; people with graduate degrees were closer, but not by much.
And only 15% of the survey participants answered 3% or under --though one-third of those answered "zero," meaning they thought nobody in the country makes more than $250K a year. Deduct this disconnected 5%, and you're left with just 10% of Americans who have a realistic sense of just how rare a $250K income is in this country.
While Republicans and Democrats gave about the same answers, the study also found that the more distorted peoples' views were, the lower their opinion of President Obama was, and the more likely they were to vote Republican last November 2. The bottom line, says Enos is this: "A person that says 20% of people make $250,000 is more likely to vote Republican than a person that says 5% of people make $250,000."
The irony, writes Enos, is that "people making less money actually believe that there are more wealthy people out there than wealthy people do."
This distortion explains a good deal about why middle- and working-class people vote for the GOP. A quarter of a million dollars sounds like an attainable income to most people -- they know at least a few people around town whom they imagine have already made it -- and they honestly think that with the right break or a little work, they might get there someday, too. It could happen.
Combine this with the common misunderstanding about how marginal tax rates work (hint: it's only the income over $250K that's taxed at the higher rate, not the whole year's take), and it's not hard to see why so many people making the average household income of $53K are incensed by the idea of increasing the marginal tax rate on the top 3% -- and why they think Obama is attacking them personally by suggesting such a horrible thing. They've bought into a myth about their chances of moving up the economic ladder that's at vast odds with the actual facts.
Some critics think Obama picked the wrong number, and that proposing at top tax rate that kicks in at $500K or a cool million would have avoided this problem. The average voter might have had a harder time imagining these numbers as being attainable. Maybe so. But maybe not: given how strong the myth of the self-made American is, and how many falsehoods you have to take on faith to believe it, we may be dealing with a level of delusion that's impervious to even really huge numbers, the kind that define only the top 0.5% of Americans.
We are living in a fact-free world now. Stories are all that matter. And in hard times, people tend to cling harder to their dreams -- especially the dream that no matter how bad things are now, someday they're going to rise above all this and triumph. Telling them the truth under these conditions is hard, and perhaps even cruel.
But one of the hallmarks of countries that are falling into chaos is that people come to believe more and more absurd things. Truth gives way to truthiness; facts aren't given the same weight as feelings. The huge disconnect between people's perceived prospects and their actual prospects shows just what a masterful job conservatives have done. They've convinced people to believe that their potential for mobility is as good or better than it ever was -- even as they've stolen the usual routes to a better life (education, home ownership, public investment, and so on) right out from under them.
Before the midterms, digby wrote this prophetic afterthought at the end of one of her posts:
But then these news outlets are all making huge profits from the right wing buy out of our democracy, so maybe it's just the price of doing business.
In this week's The Nation, there's a great article about the emergent money-media complex and the impact it has not only on our elections, but on how issues and politicians are presented by the corporate media who stand to gain much from the megabucks spent on elections.
To some extent, this is a story as old as the nation itself. Founding father John Jay thought "those who own the country ought to govern it." The battle to establish a credible system of "one person, one vote" instead of "one dollar, one vote" has been a running theme in American history. The stakes have always been the same: the less democratic our elections, the more corrupt our governance. But the current moment sees the country accelerating toward the edge of a cliff. "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both," observed Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. America is being put to the Brandeis test: democracy or plutocracy. The money-and-media election complex is creating a radically different electoral landscape than anything Americans have known since the Gilded Age. That landscape is characterized, pundits tell us, by an "enthusiasm gap." No kidding. Americans are not stupid. They knew their relatively paltry contributions, and even their votes, were unlikely to stop a $4 billion onslaught. To those bankrolling the system, voter cynicism and apathy are welcome. The more that the 2008 surge of youth participation in electoral politics dissipates, the better for them. Their interests are best served by narrowing the range of debate and participation, since that makes it easier to buy the government. As much as commentators like Jon Meacham might want to believe that "we are now living with a political class which has a financial and cultural interest in conflict rather than in governing," the hard truth is that we have a corporate class that funds electoral conflict for the purpose of forging a political class that will govern in its interest
.
Our skewed and cynical election process takes a toll on those most committed to those who fight hardest for ethical and open elections.
The emerging money-and-media election complex is perfectly designed to make participants conform or suffer the consequences. It should come as no surprise that some of the most troubling results of 2010 involved the defeats of independent players of both parties who had battled hardest for clean politics and ethical government—Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, the leading progressive Democratic reformer, was defeated, as was Representative Mike Castle, a moderate Republican beaten in Delaware's GOP Senate primary by Tea Party heroine Christine O'Donnell. Nor should it get better in 2012. "It's a bigger prize in 2012, and that's changing the White House," says Robert Duncan, chair of American Crossroads. "We've planted the flag for permanence, and we believe we will play a major role for 2012."
So this all explains how the money boys targeted key players, but it certainly doesn't give much credit to the media. From where I sit, the narrative of the midterms was as much about the constant drumbeat of the "depressed Democrat" and the Tea Party hype as it was anything else, and that came to us courtesy of every single mainstream media player out there. David Gregory does a stellar job of reinforcing right wing memes as though they're fact every week on Meet the Press. Cable news, with a few notable exceptions, does the same. And if you dare watch the 6 o'clock nightly news on one of the networks, the most you get is a 30-second sound bite with the most sensational presentation of every issue there is.
Without question, though, there would be no "Tea Party" and there would be no hype if they hadn't offered mainstream media two very important items: Sensational clips and a whole lot of money. They know a good thing when they see it.
But it's not just corporations and consultants who are setting the new agenda. The most important yet least-recognized piece of the money-and-media election complex is the commercial broadcasting industry, which just had its best money-making election season ever. Political advertising has become an enormous cash cow for it—roughly two-thirds of the campaign spending this year flowed into the coffers of TV stations; the final figure is likely to be well above $2 billion. Whereas in the 1990s the average commercial TV station received about 3 percent of its revenues from campaign ads, this year campaign money could account for as much as 20 percent. And station owners are not missing a beat; thirty-second spots that went for $2,000 in 2008 were jacked up to $5,000 this year, according to the Los Angeles Times. Much of this money will go to stations owned by a handful of Fortune 500 firms. No wonder station owners oppose campaign finance reform; their lobby role in Washington is similar to the NRA's in battling bans on assault weapons.
Here's where it cuts across journalism's turf:
The journalists who want to cut through the lies are having a harder time doing so. One of the truly unsettling developments of this election season was the decision by prominent candidates either to avoid the press, as Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle did, or to refuse opportunities to debate. Once upon a time challengers hungered to debate incumbents; in 2010 incumbents like Florida Representative Alan Grayson found themselves chasing after well-funded challengers. Feingold offered to debate his millionaire opponent in forums across the state, but Republican Ron Johnson, who had no record in public life and who even avoided interviews with newspaper editorial boards, refused.
There are solutions, ones that might not even need a recalcitrant Congress. As the authors point out, the FCC should be looking at the money spent and whose pockets it went to.
We have to stop thinking about the crisis of our politics merely in terms of reforming the campaign finance system (though of course it's important to fight for reforms). It's a media ownership and responsibility issue as well. It goes to the heart of why freedom of the press is enshrined in our Constitution. And regulatory agencies that are empowered to protect the public interest should be the first to intervene.
This really IS a crisis. We can't rely on the Supreme Court to fix what they tore asunder. The best, fastest route is via regulatory agencies, a tool the Obama administration has been using under the radar. (See this list of FTC actions for some examples).
In the words of Nancy Pelosi....
We will go through the gate," she said. "If the gate is closed, we will go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we will pole-vault in.
We must.
bench craft company scam
Jade Raymond making Splinter Cell 6 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our news of Jade Raymond making Splinter Cell 6.
The <b>News</b> Diamond reinterpreted: “Let the crowd have the middle <b>...</b>
Jonathon Shuler has published a post exploring the News Diamond from my Model for a 21st Century Newsroom. As part of that he's added an extra layer to th...
<b>News</b> and Notes - Brazil
News and Notes. November 27th, 2010 | by: Duvel | Comments (0). Ganso Return Julio Cesar appears to be out until January with a torn thigh muscle. The Inter Milan keeper has not played for his club since an October 29th start against ...
bench craft company scam
Jade Raymond making Splinter Cell 6 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our news of Jade Raymond making Splinter Cell 6.
The <b>News</b> Diamond reinterpreted: “Let the crowd have the middle <b>...</b>
Jonathon Shuler has published a post exploring the News Diamond from my Model for a 21st Century Newsroom. As part of that he's added an extra layer to th...
<b>News</b> and Notes - Brazil
News and Notes. November 27th, 2010 | by: Duvel | Comments (0). Ganso Return Julio Cesar appears to be out until January with a torn thigh muscle. The Inter Milan keeper has not played for his club since an October 29th start against ...
bench craft company scam
Progressives have suspected for years that working- and middle-class Americans vote for the GOP because they have a deeply unrealistic idea about their real chances of becoming wealthy. We've joked that working stiffs vote for tax cuts and other goodies for the rich because they seriously believe that they're going to be rich themselves someday, and want to make sure those advantages will be there for them, come the day.
To date, this has been just a guess on our part -- but a recent study now proves that this guess was right on the money. The Myth of the Self-Made American is being bolstered by a delusionally optimistic view of just how many people actually make it to the top 3% income level. It's a delusion that affects almost everyone, but particularly those who vote Republican.
Ryan Enos at yougov.com explains the results of a YouGov/Polimetrix poll conducted a few weeks before the recent election. As he explains their findings:
The hot button issue with the tax cuts is whether to renew the cuts for families earning more than $250,000 a year. The wrangling among politicians over this issue seems to mostly involve whether or not earning that amount of money qualifies somebody as wealthy.
What's amazing about the magic number of $250,000 is that, based on responses to a recent YouGov/Polimetrix poll, by and large, Americans have a very distorted view of how many people make that much money.
Any idea what proportion of American families make more than $250,000 a year? Or, to potentially make it easier, any idea what proportion of families in your state make more than $250,000 a year?
Don't feel bad if you don't know—most people don't. The actual number, nationwide is somewhere less than 3% of families earn more than $250,000 a year. What did the survey respondents say when asked this question? The average response was close to 17%!—meaning your typical survey respondent thinks that almost 1 in 5 families in America earn that kind of money, when the answer is closer to 1 in 50!
Enos goes on to point out that there are only a few states where the actual number of $250K earners even cracks 8% -- Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Virginia. But when the question was put to people in those states, they weren't even half right, because their answers tilted upward, to about 21%.
Furthermore: the more money you make, and the more education you have, the more accurate your guess becomes. People making over $150K guessed an average of about 11%; those making under $30K thought it was more like 21%. College graduates guessed 12%; people with graduate degrees were closer, but not by much.
And only 15% of the survey participants answered 3% or under --though one-third of those answered "zero," meaning they thought nobody in the country makes more than $250K a year. Deduct this disconnected 5%, and you're left with just 10% of Americans who have a realistic sense of just how rare a $250K income is in this country.
While Republicans and Democrats gave about the same answers, the study also found that the more distorted peoples' views were, the lower their opinion of President Obama was, and the more likely they were to vote Republican last November 2. The bottom line, says Enos is this: "A person that says 20% of people make $250,000 is more likely to vote Republican than a person that says 5% of people make $250,000."
The irony, writes Enos, is that "people making less money actually believe that there are more wealthy people out there than wealthy people do."
This distortion explains a good deal about why middle- and working-class people vote for the GOP. A quarter of a million dollars sounds like an attainable income to most people -- they know at least a few people around town whom they imagine have already made it -- and they honestly think that with the right break or a little work, they might get there someday, too. It could happen.
Combine this with the common misunderstanding about how marginal tax rates work (hint: it's only the income over $250K that's taxed at the higher rate, not the whole year's take), and it's not hard to see why so many people making the average household income of $53K are incensed by the idea of increasing the marginal tax rate on the top 3% -- and why they think Obama is attacking them personally by suggesting such a horrible thing. They've bought into a myth about their chances of moving up the economic ladder that's at vast odds with the actual facts.
Some critics think Obama picked the wrong number, and that proposing at top tax rate that kicks in at $500K or a cool million would have avoided this problem. The average voter might have had a harder time imagining these numbers as being attainable. Maybe so. But maybe not: given how strong the myth of the self-made American is, and how many falsehoods you have to take on faith to believe it, we may be dealing with a level of delusion that's impervious to even really huge numbers, the kind that define only the top 0.5% of Americans.
We are living in a fact-free world now. Stories are all that matter. And in hard times, people tend to cling harder to their dreams -- especially the dream that no matter how bad things are now, someday they're going to rise above all this and triumph. Telling them the truth under these conditions is hard, and perhaps even cruel.
But one of the hallmarks of countries that are falling into chaos is that people come to believe more and more absurd things. Truth gives way to truthiness; facts aren't given the same weight as feelings. The huge disconnect between people's perceived prospects and their actual prospects shows just what a masterful job conservatives have done. They've convinced people to believe that their potential for mobility is as good or better than it ever was -- even as they've stolen the usual routes to a better life (education, home ownership, public investment, and so on) right out from under them.
Before the midterms, digby wrote this prophetic afterthought at the end of one of her posts:
But then these news outlets are all making huge profits from the right wing buy out of our democracy, so maybe it's just the price of doing business.
In this week's The Nation, there's a great article about the emergent money-media complex and the impact it has not only on our elections, but on how issues and politicians are presented by the corporate media who stand to gain much from the megabucks spent on elections.
To some extent, this is a story as old as the nation itself. Founding father John Jay thought "those who own the country ought to govern it." The battle to establish a credible system of "one person, one vote" instead of "one dollar, one vote" has been a running theme in American history. The stakes have always been the same: the less democratic our elections, the more corrupt our governance. But the current moment sees the country accelerating toward the edge of a cliff. "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both," observed Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. America is being put to the Brandeis test: democracy or plutocracy. The money-and-media election complex is creating a radically different electoral landscape than anything Americans have known since the Gilded Age. That landscape is characterized, pundits tell us, by an "enthusiasm gap." No kidding. Americans are not stupid. They knew their relatively paltry contributions, and even their votes, were unlikely to stop a $4 billion onslaught. To those bankrolling the system, voter cynicism and apathy are welcome. The more that the 2008 surge of youth participation in electoral politics dissipates, the better for them. Their interests are best served by narrowing the range of debate and participation, since that makes it easier to buy the government. As much as commentators like Jon Meacham might want to believe that "we are now living with a political class which has a financial and cultural interest in conflict rather than in governing," the hard truth is that we have a corporate class that funds electoral conflict for the purpose of forging a political class that will govern in its interest
.
Our skewed and cynical election process takes a toll on those most committed to those who fight hardest for ethical and open elections.
The emerging money-and-media election complex is perfectly designed to make participants conform or suffer the consequences. It should come as no surprise that some of the most troubling results of 2010 involved the defeats of independent players of both parties who had battled hardest for clean politics and ethical government—Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, the leading progressive Democratic reformer, was defeated, as was Representative Mike Castle, a moderate Republican beaten in Delaware's GOP Senate primary by Tea Party heroine Christine O'Donnell. Nor should it get better in 2012. "It's a bigger prize in 2012, and that's changing the White House," says Robert Duncan, chair of American Crossroads. "We've planted the flag for permanence, and we believe we will play a major role for 2012."
So this all explains how the money boys targeted key players, but it certainly doesn't give much credit to the media. From where I sit, the narrative of the midterms was as much about the constant drumbeat of the "depressed Democrat" and the Tea Party hype as it was anything else, and that came to us courtesy of every single mainstream media player out there. David Gregory does a stellar job of reinforcing right wing memes as though they're fact every week on Meet the Press. Cable news, with a few notable exceptions, does the same. And if you dare watch the 6 o'clock nightly news on one of the networks, the most you get is a 30-second sound bite with the most sensational presentation of every issue there is.
Without question, though, there would be no "Tea Party" and there would be no hype if they hadn't offered mainstream media two very important items: Sensational clips and a whole lot of money. They know a good thing when they see it.
But it's not just corporations and consultants who are setting the new agenda. The most important yet least-recognized piece of the money-and-media election complex is the commercial broadcasting industry, which just had its best money-making election season ever. Political advertising has become an enormous cash cow for it—roughly two-thirds of the campaign spending this year flowed into the coffers of TV stations; the final figure is likely to be well above $2 billion. Whereas in the 1990s the average commercial TV station received about 3 percent of its revenues from campaign ads, this year campaign money could account for as much as 20 percent. And station owners are not missing a beat; thirty-second spots that went for $2,000 in 2008 were jacked up to $5,000 this year, according to the Los Angeles Times. Much of this money will go to stations owned by a handful of Fortune 500 firms. No wonder station owners oppose campaign finance reform; their lobby role in Washington is similar to the NRA's in battling bans on assault weapons.
Here's where it cuts across journalism's turf:
The journalists who want to cut through the lies are having a harder time doing so. One of the truly unsettling developments of this election season was the decision by prominent candidates either to avoid the press, as Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle did, or to refuse opportunities to debate. Once upon a time challengers hungered to debate incumbents; in 2010 incumbents like Florida Representative Alan Grayson found themselves chasing after well-funded challengers. Feingold offered to debate his millionaire opponent in forums across the state, but Republican Ron Johnson, who had no record in public life and who even avoided interviews with newspaper editorial boards, refused.
There are solutions, ones that might not even need a recalcitrant Congress. As the authors point out, the FCC should be looking at the money spent and whose pockets it went to.
We have to stop thinking about the crisis of our politics merely in terms of reforming the campaign finance system (though of course it's important to fight for reforms). It's a media ownership and responsibility issue as well. It goes to the heart of why freedom of the press is enshrined in our Constitution. And regulatory agencies that are empowered to protect the public interest should be the first to intervene.
This really IS a crisis. We can't rely on the Supreme Court to fix what they tore asunder. The best, fastest route is via regulatory agencies, a tool the Obama administration has been using under the radar. (See this list of FTC actions for some examples).
In the words of Nancy Pelosi....
We will go through the gate," she said. "If the gate is closed, we will go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we will pole-vault in.
We must.
bench craft company scam
Jade Raymond making Splinter Cell 6 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our news of Jade Raymond making Splinter Cell 6.
The <b>News</b> Diamond reinterpreted: “Let the crowd have the middle <b>...</b>
Jonathon Shuler has published a post exploring the News Diamond from my Model for a 21st Century Newsroom. As part of that he's added an extra layer to th...
<b>News</b> and Notes - Brazil
News and Notes. November 27th, 2010 | by: Duvel | Comments (0). Ganso Return Julio Cesar appears to be out until January with a torn thigh muscle. The Inter Milan keeper has not played for his club since an October 29th start against ...
bench craft company scam
Jade Raymond making Splinter Cell 6 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our news of Jade Raymond making Splinter Cell 6.
The <b>News</b> Diamond reinterpreted: “Let the crowd have the middle <b>...</b>
Jonathon Shuler has published a post exploring the News Diamond from my Model for a 21st Century Newsroom. As part of that he's added an extra layer to th...
<b>News</b> and Notes - Brazil
News and Notes. November 27th, 2010 | by: Duvel | Comments (0). Ganso Return Julio Cesar appears to be out until January with a torn thigh muscle. The Inter Milan keeper has not played for his club since an October 29th start against ...
bench craft company scam
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