Caught a bit of our local NPR station interviewing John Hodgman, and he made an observation that rather succintly summed up the core problem in the US:
(and I'm paraphrasing here)
"There's a problem in this country where we tell people that money doesn't buy you happiness, that you can be happy without wealth. But what it doesn't address is that wealth buys you stability. It buys you not having to spend most of your waking moments worrying about whether you're going to make your bills this month. And there are people who have a vested interest in keeping people out of that level of wealth, because people vote mostly out of fear."
The more I think about it, the more I think he's spot on. If most people weren't 1-2 paychecks away from financial disaster, they'd be more rational and more open to proposals like subsidized healthcare or free education or environmental regulations. But when you keep people that on edge abut their security, even the smallest fee or tax seems like the straw that will break the camel's back. Conversely, if you're so far down the totem pole that government programs are the only thing keeping you alive, you're going to fight tooth and nail against attempts to scale back or remove those programs.
And we've got this "poor but happy" narrative in American culture that serves to pacify and shame people for wanting a more equitable distribution of wealth by equating it to greed and envy. If you're poor and want to be rich, you're greedy. But if you're already rich, then you just "worked hard and had great ideas". You're a "job creator", someone to be admired and respected.
We've fundamentally forgotten that the American Dream, the Horatio Alger story, is "rags-to-riches", not "rags-to-happy to just have a job, and really who needs money anyhow when I have all these wonderful commercial products to distract me?"
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Topic: Murrican Politics Megathread 2016: There Will Be Hell Toupée (Read 1584902 times)