One of the big 5 rationalizations I've gotten pretty consistently over the years for just why it is some of the poorest people in our country vote to install representatives who advocate only for some of the richest people in our country is, they think they're going to be rich themselves someday. We're talking about folks just wracked by poverty and looking into a bleak future filled with even more privation and degradation flowing out of a Washington that's rode its sine wave of concern for the least of these to its nadir with the ascendency of a Republican majority to the House of Representatives. We're talking about poor people who will always be poor, whose parents never knew naught but poverty, and who might very well be able to trace their lineage to serfdom or indentured servitude, perpetual peons with neither the skills nor the education necessary to work their way out of their jam. We're talking about people who, even if trickledown economics worked, would never feel even a mist of that golden flow from down in the deep hole of wretched despair that is unremitting poverty. And yet they vote Republican. Because they think they might someday be rich.
Want a statistic that captures the very essence of economic aristocracy? Two numbers that speak with more clarity and authority on the enduring problem of income and wealth inequality in a nation of "equals?"
39 percent of kids born rich or upper middle class will die rich or upper middle class; 42 percent of kids born into poverty will die poor.
If that doesn't convince you that voting with the idea of protecting your future wealth from the rapacious claws of the tax man might not be serving your interests, how's about a chart?
Source*
As you can see from what I pray is a clarifying and illuminating pastel heaping of facepalm, someone already dealing with all the joyful vicissitudes of living in poverty is less likely to reach that far shore we call with a sentimentality typical of our people, the American Dream, than they are to wake up for all their tomorrows still mired in the nightmare of trying to explain to their children why they have to go to school with empty bellies. Again.
So, red state voters whose median incomes are below the national average, who have the highest proportion of their citizens working for minimum wage (I'm looking at you Texas), and whose Republican governors and legislatures are beating the shit out of workers, kids, and the elderly, now you know. You're never, ever going to be rich. Ain't gonna happen. No way. Can we put to bed, once and for all, the idée fixe on wealth that's driven otherwise sensible folks to put their future gains over their present needs when they defend the rich from taxation and regulation by voting in anyone who promises not to raise taxes? Seriously, you've got every right to vote for whomever you choose, and I respect and honor the choice even when I disagree with it. But if one more wingnut comes at me with some variation on the theme that they don't want to pay progressive taxes when they strike it rich, I swear to Jeebus I'll have my bodyguards beat them senseless with gold-plated billy clubs when I make my millions as a Hollywood screenwriter/astrologer to the stars.
*I took some liberties with the categories as presented because quintiles don't readily match up to terms like "Middle Class," and "Rich." For the sake of clarity, I lumped the bottom and second quintiles into "Poor or Working Class;" the middle and fourth quintiles were called "Middle Class;" and the top quintile was called "Upper Middle Class or Rich."
Sun Jul 10, 2011 at 9:16 AM PT: This diary has pretty much come and gone and fallen off the Recent list, so it's probable that nobody will read this update but me, but something needs to be said. I caught a lot of flack from reading-challenged commentors who somehow lasered in on the idea that I was saying that poor people can never improve their lot in life. That wasn't what I said, that wasn't the message supported by the graph I provided, and that wasn't what I meant.
Read the diaries before you comment, people. The graph plainly shows that most people have about a 40 percent chance of making it into the middle class. For folks stuck in abject poverty, a solid middle class income is an absolute improvement. I didn't say that people couldn't get ahead.
I said they aren't going to get rich. Jeebus.