8:58 | Fred Barbash-Moderator - What's "rich" these days? Who's "rich" versus "affluent" versus "better off?" The President is proposing some tax increases on households with incomes greater than $250,000 a year in order to fund new initiatives in health care. How this debate get framed will have a significant impact on its fate. No doubt the framing depends in part on whether Americans see taxes going up for "rich" people or, say, "upper middle class" people or, say, "small business people" or if the target group is defined simply as the 2 percent of households with gross incomes $250,000 or above?
Arena contributor Joshua Tucker, put the public opinion calculus rather well in his post:
"I suspect that in the current economic climate, taxing the rich will not only fly, but will likely be the most popular way to fund any major initiative that the President wants to advance. Although not all rich people are bankers, every story that emerges about excesses in the financial sector – especially those related to pay and bonuses – will make it that much easier to sell increases in taxes on the wealthy to the American public, especially when it is continually combined with Obama’s rhetoric focusing on tax cuts for 95% of working Americans. Thus Obama’s plan is not necessarily a pro-tax policy, but rather a “pro-taxing the rich” policy, which may turn out to be a very different animal in the midst of a severe economic crisis. It is going to be interesting to watch the nation’s reaction to the likely forthcoming Republican campaign to oppose tax increases on only the wealthiest Americans on the “principle” of opposing taxes generally. With this in mind, it is worth noting that even in April of 2007 – a little bit into the collapse of the housing market but certainly before most Americans were aware of the depths of the coming economic storm – Gallup reported that 66% of Americans felt that upper-income people were paying too little in federal income taxes, 66% percent felt that money and wealth in the country should be more evenly distributed, and more respondents agreed with the statement that “our government should redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich” (49%) than disagreed with it (47%) ). Support for redistribution seemed to have dropped a little bit in taken in late October 2008 during the post-Joe the plumber heat of the presidential campaign, but it would be very interesting to see where these numbers are today. If any other Arena contributors or readers have more recent figures on these types of opinions, I hope they will post them."
How would you frame it?
Good morning all. Welcome to Arena Live. If you'd like to make a comment, write your name in the appropriate box and send along your thoughts. We can't publish all comments unfortunately and we can't publish those without a name attached and we can't publish anything that includes trash talk. With that in mind, have at it.
|
