...within days of the State of the Union, the Obama administration was forced to reverse course and abandon its plan to make 529 plans less generous. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who represents San Francisco, and House Budget Committee ranking Democrat Chris Van Hollen, who represents the wealthy Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., were the key drivers of the decision, according to a report by Rachael Bade and Allie Grasgreen in Politico. My guess is that both Pelosi and Van Hollen saw firsthand the fury of upper-middle-income voters who sensed that Obama, normally a paragon of upper-middle-class virtues, was daring to mess with one of their precious tax breaks. Paul Waldman, writing for the Washington Post, had it right when he observed that ¡°the 529 proposal was targeted at what may be the single most dangerous constituency to anger: the upper middle class.¡±
To summarize: If you¡¯re poor, a 529 plan gives you nothing, since you don¡¯t pay income taxes in the first place; the AOTC gives you $4,000 ($5,000 under Obama¡¯s proposal) because you can take $1,000 of the credit per year even if you pay no taxes. If you¡¯re in the ¡°middle class¡± (making at least $74,900 and able to save $3,000 per year per child), a 529 plan gives you $5,800; the AOTC gives you $10,000 ($12,500 under Obama¡¯s proposal). If you¡¯re in the upper class, a 529 plan gives you $26,300; the AOTC gives you nothing. Do I even need to write the rest of the article?posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:11 AM on February 4, 2015 [12 favorites]
schmod: For every Mitt Romney, there are ten thousand small business owners paying themselves $200k a year, while milking their businesses dry by underpaying their employees, cheating on taxes, and voting Republican.And they collectively own less than Mitt Romney's class, so I'm not convinced they are nearly the problem that the 1% are.
While much of the shifting balance among affluent voters reflects changes in the national mood, two important demographic changes among high income voters are related to the parties¡¯ fortunes. First, members of minority groups constitute a greater share of high-income voters than at any time in the past. The proportion of top-income voters who are black, Hispanic, or from another racial minority background has doubled from 10% in 1995 to 21% today, while the proportion who are white has dropped from 90% to 79%.Andrew Gelman: Rich people are more likely to be Republican but not more likely to be conservative
Secondly, a greater share of top-income voters have a post-graduate education than in the past ¡ª 35% up from 24% in 1995. In general, Americans with post-graduate training are more likely to be Democrats than those with four-year degrees or who attended but did not complete college.
The poorest people are more likely to be liberal, and the richest are more likely to identify as moderate rather than conservative, but overall there¡¯s less going on here than I would¡¯ve expected.posted by tonycpsu at 11:40 AM on February 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
In contrast, the relation between income and party identification is strong, and goes in the expected direction.
There must be a lot of low-income moderate Democrats and high-income moderate Republicans out there.
*Correction, Jan. 31, 2015: The article originally misstated that homeowners who arrived before the drawbridge was lowered see their homes grow in value. The gentrifying homeowners raise the metaphorical drawbridge to keep their neighborhoods exclusive."Mr. Salam, sorry to bother you. This sentence here - did you mean 'drawbridge' or 'portcullis'?"
Though virtually all of these polite, well-groomed people were politically liberal, I sensed that ...Why does he feel that his hand-wavery feelings and guesses are worth publishing? It's because the UMC Conspiracy is keeping the truth from us:
Yet without really reflecting on it, I felt that ...
Let¡¯s just say that upper-middle-class status is a state of mind.
My guess is that...
It doesn¡¯t look like it.
Want to guess how popular the idea of increasing the wages of nannies is with the upper-middle-class people who employ them? I¡¯d love to know, but I¡¯m sorry to report that upper-middle-class pollsters have yet to ask the question.Sorry, but I'm not buying any horseshit today, thanks.
Bank of England Governor Mark Carney worries that technology will disrupt the banking and financial services industry in just the same way that it has torn apart newspapers, radio and the postal service. His chief concern is that governments will fail to regulate it until it's too late ¡ª "an Uber-type situation," as he put it at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week.which brings me back to...
The news that foreign currency exchange startup TransferWise has raised $58 million in investment at a valuation of $1 billion proves that Carney is right to worry: Tech startups ¡ª or fintech startups, as they're called in Europe ¡ª are working as fast as they can to turn traditional banks into the steam-engine manufacturers of the 21st Century.
Even though they made up only 14% of all the rezoned lots in the City, the new residential capacity added to upzoned lots outweighed the capacity lost from lots that were downzoned or contextual-only rezoned. As a result, the net effect of these rezonings was to increase the City¡¯s total residential development capacity ¡°on paper¡± by about 1.7%. This represents almost 100 million additional square feet of residential development capacity¡ªor enough space, at least ¡°on paper,¡± for about 80,000 new units or 200,000 new residents.Plus, the downzonings you're bringing up? They aren't exactly taking place in charcuterie board and Baby Bjorn central. Ozone Park is a far-flung neighborhood with a median income of a little over $40k¡ªthat's $10k below the median income for the city as a whole. Is an entrenched lower-to-middle middle-class white population using downzoning to keep out immigrants? It might be! But raising the specter of schmancy upper-middle-class Manhattanite boogeymen, as Salam does, only turns attention away from that conversation.
But, in practice, just saying ¡°we should build more¡± is not enough, especially if the goal is to make cities affordable. More than 180,000 new units of housing were built from 2002 to 2011¡ªthe vacancy rate has actually inched up¡ªand the city has not gotten cheaper.posted by evidenceofabsence at 4:35 PM on February 4, 2015
To be short of money when there's work to get done is like not having enough inches to build a house. We have the materials, the tools, the space, the time, the skills and the intent to build ... but we have no inches today? Why be short of inches? Why be short of money?the Hipcrime Vocab: Crazy Leftist Policies (from a UK perspective)
The welfare state and the NHS, perfectly affordable when the country was desperately poor after the war are, we are told, mysteriously unaffordable now that the country is infinitely richer. Workers cannot expect proper wages, or indeed wages at all, or proper conditions of tenure, or pensions, or employment rights, because, again it is said, there are millions more workers waiting to do their jobs more cheaply. The state, which has for years done an invaluable job of providing a much-needed safety net for the poor, is again for reasons never once explained going to be healthier when it is starved to a point when it can no longer help anyone. Public broadcasting and public art, which have done so much to enrich tens of millions of lives, will apparently be so much more purposeful when they are slimmed down so they can reach none.as SRW says: "On 'impossible', 'utopian' policies we have tried successfully before, and then forgotten they are even possible."
In other words, you can contextualize the kind of policy criticism Salam is making within a general libertarian critique (government will always be co-opted by those who already have power; here are examples how upper-middle-class professionals use government to shut the gate on the middle class; we need less government so nobody can rig the game that way). Or you can contextualize it within a general left-wing critique (here are examples of how upper-middle-class liberals act to protect their class interests to the detriment of the poor and middle class; we can¡¯t let a left-wing politics be compromised by the need to keep a large and wealthy class on-side just because it makes the right sounds; we need a class-based politics that doesn¡¯t get hijacked by cultural politics). These are both frameworks for talking about how to reduce the political influence of a favored class, and create an opening for new entrants.I like this one: the large quotes mean I don't have to click on Slate link.
But Salam doesn¡¯t make either argument. Instead, he¡¯s says we need to guilt the upper middle class into being a more civically-responsible gentry:
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lovehate!posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:44 AM on February 4, 2015 [1 favorite]