One of my wealthiest friends on Facebook has, over the past few weeks, posted more than 50 items about Bernie Sanders and/or her passion for Bernie Sanders. A recent example was a photo of a Bernie Sanders bumper sticker affixed to her shiny new BMW (BMW badge also in photo). She’s a stay-at-home wife to a partner at a law firm with annual profits per partner of roughly $3.5 million (i.e., her husband very likely earns in that neighborhood). As far as I know she spends almost all of her husband’s income. They live in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the United States and recently expanded their already sizable house despite the fact that their children have departed for (expensive private) colleges. With Sanders promoting ideas such as a 90-percent federal tax rate on income over $1 million (with state tax that would be nearly 100 percent), her Facebook postings are tantamount to her saying “I want the government to cut my spending power roughly in half.” But she could already cut her spending power in half by donating the majority of her husband’s income to charity and this she does not do.
Readers: What’s going on here? I can understand why people with low incomes would support Sanders but why a rich person whose lifestyle he is supposedly targeting for reduction?
Your friend supports Bernie Saunders because she believes that a world with Bernie Saunders president would be a better world than a world with, say, Hilary Clinton president. She would be happier living in such a world. She is willing to sacrifice half her disposable income to live in such a world.
She is not, however willing to sacrifice half her disposable income to satisfy your somewhat rigorous notions of consistency.
“Rich guilt?” Will this become as trendy as “white guilt?” Magic 8-ball says, “Not likely.”
As far as I can tell the vast majority of people with means would like to have their guilt assuaged by the government redistributing some of their assets. Since the government is not good or efficient at practically anything, this is always a little mysterious to me. Whenever you hear someone suggesting the government do something, remind them about the DMV. And the Post Office. And the military. Those are the most visible failures.
Also remind them of Bill Gates, who has made more of a difference in the lives of the two billion poorest people than any government has. And Jimmy Carter, who has done similar work with fewer resources. Bill & Melinda Gates’ legacy will be astonishing fifty years from now. And that’s with an estate worth half of what it was before the government went after him for the monopoly. (Someone at one point had a Bill Gates Wealth clock web page…)
Now, would I like to close Gitmo, cut the military budget to a third and have the Feds fund some innovation in infrastructure (Hyperloop)? Sure. But I am not foolish enough to expect that from the next president, whoever she is.
If you want to look at it that way, one major difference is that a vote for Sanders could possibly increase taxes on all rich people. However, if this woman is a Facebook friend, couldn’t you send her a message and ask her yourself?
There is the old joke about how Jews live like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans. Did your friend grow up rich? One’s self image is formed somewhere in the past, so Jews always feel as if they just got off the boat at Ellis Island and were blackballed at the country club even if this happened to their grandfathers and not to them. And they vote accordingly.
To quote a rather relevant conversation :
In summa: Your Facebook friend may be able to duck, dive and dodge herself out of harm’s way, leaving the speeding bus to hit those just beneath her, thus removing her competition. No different from most every other protectionist strategy, really.
She knows there’s a 0% chance of Sanders being elected. She believes her posturing is how she can have the appearance of a benevolent person without having to part with her fancy car.
Sometimes people do not value their money unless they earn it themselves. Sometimes rich people do not want opportunities for others to get rich, so they can lock in their class superiority. Sometimes women are irrational, and act emotionally. Sometimes people put on a show of political views just to look enlightened or morally pure. Sometimes Jews support other Jews. There are a lot of possible explanations.
Maybe she’s just plain stupid…the same way that poor southerners continue to vote for republicans even though they are forever raped by them.
If she believes that the nature or size of the problems Bernie Sanders would address with his increased taxes are such that only the government can tackle them effectively, and that government can tackle them effectively, then her stance consistent.
Some women just want to see the world Bern.
More specifically, the Republicans in Congress aren’t going to allow any taxes to rise on the rich, no matter what. Sanders supporters expect to see lots of nice programs for equality for nice gay people and a cleaner environment and simpler access to quality health care. Taxes aren’t going up.
And gerrymandering has gotten deeply careful and shameless recently so Republicans are likely to control Congress, regardless of how the people vote, until at least 2033. The Republicans have an absolute lock on the House until 2023 which would cover almost all of a theoretical Sanders presidency.
My parents weren’t blackballed at the country club as they never applied to any, but there were covenants against them in the deeds they signed.
Why shouldn’t I, regardless of current law, my economics, where I live, keep knowledge of blackballs and covenants in mind as I vote?
“Why shouldn’t I, regardless of current law, my economics, where I live, keep knowledge of blackballs and covenants in mind as I vote?”
For the same reason that when you drive you look mostly out the windshield at what is coming toward you, with only an occasional glance in the rear view mirror. If you want to know where future threats to the Jews of America are coming from, it isn’t going to be from Winthrop at the country club, whose great grandchildren are probably celebrating their bar mitzvahs (one of FDR’s great grandsons is a rabbi) . I’d be more worried about BDS leftist types, whose “anti-Israel” rhetoric is really (very) thinly disguised anti-Semitism. About PETA type who want to outlaw kosher slaughter. About Muslim immigrants who bring their anti-Semitism with them from the old country. It’s important to know about history but fighting the last war is usually not a good idea.
@ mark #7: right-O. Posturing phony do-gooder who knows it won’t cost her hubby a penny. Big spender of a spouse’s money.
@ Colin Summers #3
You forgot to add: enriched himself to be a do-gooder at the ENORMOUS EXPENSE of billions of lost man hours & irritation over beyond-shoddy[*] quality of his software. So ease on that made difference pedal.
[^*] “quick and dirty”-legacy of Seattle QDOS bought for $50K becoming MSDOS when IBM came calling after Gary Kildall of CP/M’s fame went flying rather than wait for the suits.
> For the same reason that when you drive you look mostly out the windshield at what is coming toward you, with only an occasional glance in the rear view mirror. If you want to know where future threats to the Jews of America are coming from, it isn’t going to be from….
Fallacy of the excluded middle and George Santayana beg to differ.
So too the fact that what happened to my parents and theirs in the past helps enlighten me about what might be happening to others now.
“what happened to my parents and theirs in the past helps enlighten me about what might be happening to others now.”
OK, now we are getting warm. You yourself may be in the country club now, but you identify with those who are still struggling who remind you of grandpa. Too bad that they don’t identify with you.
This is a peculiarly Jewish disease. Rich gentiles are willing to forget their hillbilly ancestors in a New York minute.
The following are just my opinions and generalizations:
1) The majority of Women are totalitarian in a sense – they want to impose security on everyone.
2) Some people really think money grows on trees (another variant of “people who do not earn their own money, do not value it”). Even highly educated people who make a good living.
3) Most people choose politics like baseball teams. Forget principles, philosophy and/or ideas. Being a democrat means supporting your team, even if you don’t agree with everything (I will give Bernie credit, he sticks to his socialist principles, unlike the weather vanes , i.e. HillBushes / Demopublicans )
4) It is cool to be compassionate, not cool to be realistic. Nobody wants to hear the gravy train is ending.
When I was attending an expensive liberal arts college in Vermont, most of my fellow students would have voted for Bernie. The irony being that all of these kids came from rich New England families and West Coast elites. There was a freshman from Texas. I think he lasted a year until he transferred out. Not being a Democrat was like walking around having a swastika stamped on your forehead. God forbid you opened your mouth at a public forum and questioned the feasibility of all the goodies the government should hand out.
I highly suspect that rich Democrats tend to be people who make their money easily (the customers come to their door step), hence the less they value it. This includes people in the entertainment industry, lawyers for family/litigation/unemployment, professors of higher education, etc (eg. members of professional monopoly guilds).
Similar to what others have said above, I have come to believe many of the super-rich feel undeserving of their wealth.
The money earned in a blue collar job is keenly felt to be deserved. When one provides hard physical labor for a (relatively small) paycheck, that money is exchanged for something of clear concrete value. The worker feels he more than deserves it.
Most of America’s rich earned their money, started out with “real” jobs. They remember what it was like to earn their keep. But as they got older and started working higher-paying jobs, reaping the greater rewards of their specialized skillsets, the amount of money they received versus the amount of work they put in for that money skyrocketed. And even they start to be a little disgusted by how much they are making when there are hard-working people in the world who can’t make ends meet.
And so they turn to the Church of Government, and they tithe, and they receive absolution. How efficiently–if at all–the government uses their money to help the Dickensian poor doesn’t matter as much as their good intentions. If these people are predisposed to leftism, no further explanation is required since they ascribe goodness to government by definition. If they aren’t, their only sin need be ignorance.
I like this explanation because it doesn’t require the Big Government-loving rich to be schemers trying to paralyze the middle class. Most people have a functional moral compass but simply disagree on the best ways to do good.
@Jerry: My parents weren’t blackballed at the country club as they never applied to any, but there were covenants against them in the deeds they signed.
And just like during the years 1941 – 1845, many, many non-Jewish Americans fought to eliminate those covenants that so offend you to this day.
I’m disturbed that several commentators are assuming she is Jewish, likely due to her wealth, when Philip never mentioned this. Who knows or cares about her ethnicity?
trying to look righteous
Izzie, in honesty it doesn’t sound like you are getting warm, but feel free to keep trying.
Smartest Woman… So? What’s with your date ranges? Oh, I guess it’s a typo. The covenants I refer to were dated in the 50s.
A lot of you seem to suffer from the fallacy of the excluded middle. And or project a ton of your own shit onto my statement that I keep knowledge of blackballs and covenants in mind as I vote.
Very weird guys, sorry I don’t vote the way you know is best for me to.
>OK, now we are getting warm. You yourself may be in the country club now, but you identify with those who are still struggling who remind you of grandpa. Too bad that they don’t identify with you.
> This is a peculiarly Jewish disease. Rich gentiles are willing to forget their hillbilly ancestors in a New York minute.
This is just so weird I can’t even parse it.
1941-1945 is I believe a reference to WWII and the hundred of thousands of Americans who died trying to free Europe from Hitler.
Jerry keeps referring to the excluded middle. So rather than just looking toward the past or considering the future, we also have the choice of gazing at our navels.
“The covenants I refer to were dated in the 50s.”
That’s impossible since such covenants were banned by the Supreme Court in 1948 (Shelley v. Kraemer). Racial covenants in the US had a very short heyday – from the 1920s when the Supreme Court made clear that segregation ordinances were unconstitutional (so private covenants were tried as an end run), until the 1940s when the Supreme Court said that the covenants were also unenforceable. Their flipside was the “blockbusting” that then ensued, when entire Jewish neighborhoods became black virtually overnight and community leaders were legally helpless to resist. Not only was much valuable community solidarity and infrastructure lost but the result was just more segregation.
What I wrote:
> My parents weren’t blackballed at the country club as they never applied to any, but there were covenants against them in the deeds they signed.
What you wrote:
> “The covenants I refer to were dated in the 50s.”
That’s impossible since such covenants were banned by the Supreme Court in 1948
Think Izzie. These two situations are not mutually exclusive.
Okay, I’ll flip all the cards over.
The covenants were still in the deeds. They just weren’t enforced.
As to the excluded middle, when I write
> Why shouldn’t I, regardless of current law, my economics, where I live, keep knowledge of blackballs and covenants in mind as I vote?
That’s not any indication of how I will vote on any specific issue, it’s background information to my eventual vote.
Once again, I must apologize if my vote conforms to what I believe is in my best interests and not what you insist must be my best interest and what I feel should be my best interest even though you no absolutely nothing about me.
That’s a common fallacy committed by many people on all sides. Why does that group vote this way when it’s obvious to me they should vote that way! I mean, I am so smert and certainly smerter than they!
If they were still in the title records from the past they weren’t “dated” in the 1950s. After the ’48 ruling, deed recorders would no longer accept new covenants like this. Of course covenants that were put on record in the ’20s to the ’40s were still on record in the ’50s – they are still on record today. Visit your county courthouse and you can see them. When you search deed records, everything since the beginning of the recording system is still there. The records from the 19th century were handwritten by professional scriveners – every letter is perfect and the same.
Bernie Sanders is a fake socialist.
President is not a magical position in which
things can be bypassed.
Look for Bernie Sanders’s Foreign policy and see
if that is socialist or peacenik.
Bernie has always said what can one man do in the senate.
Not like he wants to filibuster for days or something.
Has he ever take a legislation hostage.
Will he be able to appoint non Wallstreet people to Treasury and or Fed.
Socialist as judges which rule against corporations.
Never.
People constantly vote against their own interests. Why would droves of poor people vote for Republicans that want to take away programs that the same voters need to feed themselves and their families, or that offer them cheap or free health care when they otherwise couldn’t afford it?
Izzie, the house was purchased in the early 50s in a brand new subdivision.
Apple LaserWriters were not around then.
Thimk about it.
It’s clear from just this thread Izzie, how little you know about me and how eager you are to make erroneous assumptions. And yet you insist you know better than I do what is actually in my best interest, and how I think, and how I vote. To the extent you label it “disease”.
This is not just you, this is virtually everyone that looks at another group and wonders, “why do they vote against their interests!”
It’s arrogant. It’s irrational.
Maybe she took a look at Bernie Sanders’ Issues page and decided that she agreed with most of it.
I bet jerry is a lot of fun at parties.
Like every other dot com currently worth over $300 billion , the book of face has no correlation with reality. A rich trophy wife is most often a starving male college student in real life. It’s the loners who act poor who are usually the rich ones in real life. Real rich people don’t mention their wealth online, never ever mention anything about their spouses, & only rarely mention something about a kid.
@jack crossfire got it right. I know some very rich people (they are worth millions) and if you run into them, or talk with them, you won’t know their status at all. They don’t over spend, over hype themselves, or disrespect you. They live a simple life that doesn’t scream: “hey do you know who I’am?” I also know some so-so rich people who are just the opposite.
I never meet Philip’s rich friend, but maybe that’s what she is looking for, the attention she wants just like Donald Trump is?
Izzie,
“Deed recorders” do not read every word in a deed. Gosh, just imagining that makes me laugh. I’m a real estate dealer in the south and could show you deeds dated in the NINETEEN-SIXTIES that forbade the property to be resold to blacks. The ’60’s!!
There may have been laws forbidding such, but plenty of the deed preparers must have been ignoring them. 🙂
Jack Crossfire,
I agree and meant to include this in my earlier post: most rich/elite do not Facebook.
Once your needs are addressed (stuff in Maslow’s pyramid essentially), you feel rich or poor not in absolute terms, but comparatively to the people who surround you. Whether you feel glorious or miserable in a Porsche mostly depends on whether your colleagues drive Fords or McLarens.
So if all of the people she compares with are hit similarly by taxes, she won’t feel significantly poorer. If she gives half her husband’s wealth away while her friends don’t, she’ll feel comparatively poor.
Also, many people don’t believe in elections, and even less so in their power to influence it. If she feels like Sanders proposes a globally better world, although it wouldn’t be better for her, she might feel good advocating for the perceived common good, without fear that she’s significantly help this greater good to occcur.
Besides (and I’m surprised that you haven’t written it), what impacts her personal wealth the most is who supports the most alimony-friendly policy. I don’t know whether it happens to be Sanders.
Never trust someone who puts a bumper sticker on a luxury car…
Hate to ask the obvious but have you confirmed that your friend actually is aware of what Berrnie Sanders’ tax objective would mean to her family’s income and lifestyle?
Perhaps she just doesn’t understand (or hasn’t considered) the consequences to her.
Phil has called her “one of his wealthiest friends on Fuckfacebook,” so presumably she’s been vetted as to the soundness of her opinions on other matters. Therefore there’s no case to assume her being ignorant, or “economics undeveloped,” as you imply. Quacks like a duck, it’s a duck (or, as I posited, a posturing, phony socialist).