Thursday, October 08, 2020

Rich Democrats

I'm unsettled by the trends noted in this Bloomberg piece: specifically Democrats are becoming richer.  It's good that we've been giving money through ActBlue to the various campaigns and party organizations, but I became a Democrat back in the day when the party was a coalition of unions, ethnic groupts, and a smallish group of "eggheads", as they were famously known in the 1950's.

Now Democrats are a bit richer than Republicans, at least by some measures.  Apparently the Republicans still have the business class, the car dealers, insurance agents, small business types, but the Democrats are supported by the eggheads' grandchildren, college-educated and many with graduate degrees, plus minority groups.  A couple of my concerns: 

  • there can be a disconnect in interests between the two.  For example, the rich Dems in the Northeast want to remove the limit on deductibility of state and local taxes which was part of Trump's tax cut law. 
  • And all too often there's a lot of NIMBYism among the rich, when additional development would increase the supply of affordable housing.

No comments: