Red_Dragon wrote:
 

No question about it and the second part of the poll is whether we would favor receiving a 10,000 check in the mail next Friday.  That one did well also.

Majority of Americans favor wealth tax on very rich: Reuters/Ipsos poll

 Red_Dragon wrote:
 
Wow. Painfully accurate.
c.

 Red_Dragon wrote:
 

I'm sort of optimistic that we're nearing the end of this anti-union pendulum swing. 

What Working-class and Poor White People Need to Understand About Rich White People

 R_P wrote: 
Lapham in fine form, as always: Democracy is not something which can be achieved, it is an aspiration.

 p4jkafla wrote: 
yep.  There is no middle class.  There is the top 1%, Rich, Working class, working poor and poverty

 kurtster wrote: 

Lewis Lapham: Can America Survive the Rule of a “Stupified Plutocracy”?

 miamizsun wrote: 
From a practical standpoint, I would put the metric at the tax scale.  But there are a million shades of gray here to say the least depending on the definition of "is".

 Red_Dragon wrote: 
Triskele dragged you up from low class?

 

the problem with social science, if we can call it that, is that the definitions/standards/labels aren't precise

it seems class is used as a divisive term a lot

is it a measure of wealth or behavior?

and who determines that? (or what actions)

can a person with very little property have class?

or a person with a lot of property have class?

politically it is very subjective

talk amongst yourselves

 Red_Dragon wrote: 
Thank you sir, may I have another!  I know, I am right there with you on the scale.

 Red_Dragon wrote: 
The size of your paycheck and that you own a home.

What makes me middle-class?

Las Vegas airport flooded with private jets before Mayweather vs Pacquiao...

Why Rich People Think They’re Middle Class » Sociological Images

Chris Christie’s net worth (at least $4 million) is 50 times that of the average American. His household income of $700,000 (his wife works in the financial sector) is 13 times the national median.  But he doesn’t think he’s rich.

I don’t consider myself a wealthy man. . . . and I don’t think most people think of me that way.

That’s what he told the Manchester Union-Leader on Monday when he was in New Hampshire running for president.

Of course, being out of touch with reality doesn’t automatically disqualify a politician from the Republican nomination, even at the presidential level, though misreading the perceptions of “most people” may be a liability.

But I think I know what Christie meant. He uses the term “wealth,” but what he probably has in mind is class.  He says, “Listen, wealth is defined in a whole bunch of different ways . . . ”  No, Chris. Wealth is measured one way – dollars. It’s social class that is defined in a whole bunch of different ways. (...)

Tea Party is an anti-populist elite tool. And it has progressives fooled.
by Michael Lind
Salon
October 22, 2013

This is not some spontaneous uprising. It's the newest incarnation of a rich, elite, right-wing tradition...

Throughout the progressive and New Deal eras, to be sure, urban American intellectuals like H.L. Mencken tended to despise rural people, in every country; Mencken despised European “peasants” as much as he despised the provincial American “booboisie.” Hoftstadter infused Menckenseque contempt for rural and working-class Americans into postwar intellectual liberalism, by means of influential books like “Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915″ (1944); “The American Political Tradition“ (1948); “The Age of Reform” (1955); “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” (1963). By emphasizing genuine examples of racism and anti-Semitism among agrarian Populists, without pointing out that these biases were widely shared among American Anglo-Protestant elites who often despised the Populists, Hoftstadter convinced several generations of American college students and professors that the Populists were a kind of incipient fascist force. By the 1960s, all too many American liberal intellectuals looked at their working-class fellow citizens and saw, not the heroic workers of the new Deal era murals, but peasants with pitchforks and proto-Nazis.

Many mid-century liberal intellectuals blamed first McCarthyism and then the rise of the Goldwater-Reagan movement on a deranged white working class...

Recent scholarship on Goldwater-Reagan conservatism has demolished the idea that it represented a rebellion by disoriented yahoos...
 

 helenofjoy wrote: 
Salutations!  I hope you are having a marvelous Tuesday right this minute...