What’s Wrong With Mamaroneck?

This time of year always makes me wistful, and not just because I’ll soon be leaving fair Harvard. In less than a month, my classmates will move on to more lucrative lives. With their Harvard diplomas, they are shoo-ins for the upper middle class, and many will climb even higher. So what’s the problem? With all this upward mobility—as a matter of statistical certainty—many of today’s residents of the Kremlin on the Charles will wake up not too long from now as (gasp) Republicans.

Until recently, I never asked why educated liberals become wealthy Republicans. The Republicans serve the rich, I thought, so anybody who makes any money has a strong incentive to start voting red. Ideals are nice, but they ain’t gonna pay for the new Porsche. Granted, this view has a strong basis in fact. The Republican Party does support policies that help the rich. And rich people are smart—they know their own interests. Poor rural folk may be voting against their economic interests because of God, guns, and gays, but rich people aren’t fooled by the social issues; they know their economic interests, and they vote them.

For all the hype about moral values conservatives, George W. Bush got most of his votes from the upper income brackets. Since the exceptionally rich, by definition, make up a small portion of the population, Bush relied on the upper-middle class for the bulk of his votes. Nobody wrote a book about it, because everybody expected it. After the Bush tax cut, commentators agreed, the country club set would be nuts to vote for anybody else. There’s just one problem: Bush didn’t do what everybody thought he did.

As Bush began promoting his tax cut, he repeatedly threw out one statistic intended to prove that his tax plan was actually good for the poor. The Bush tax cut, he claimed, would increase the percentage of the nation’s tax burden shouldered by taxpayers from the top 40 percent of income earners. Since so much of what Bush said about his tax plans was just plain fabricated, I and a lot of liberals assumed that this statistic was just another example of “fuzzy math.” But it wasn’t.

Bush’s tax cuts allowed a fair number of low-income taxpayers to stop paying income tax. Every one of these taxpayers pays far more in regressive payroll taxes than they ever did in income tax, but this move allowed Bush to claim that his tax cut was all about the working class. Since Bush was cutting 100 percent of the income tax burden of low-income payers, he could claim that his tax cuts were actually better for the working class than for the wealthy. The millions that the richest Americans took home thanks to the tax cut was still far less than 100 percent of their tax burden, so Bush could claim that he had actually done more for Joe Sixpack than Dick Cheney.

But that cost still had to be paid by somebody, and it sure wasn’t going to be Dick Cheney. Bush decided on the upper middle class; though he cut taxes dramatically for the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers, he did very little for the upper middle class, those taxpayers between the 50th and the 1st income percentiles. This group wound up paying a larger share of the nation’s tax burden—so much so that Bush could cut taxes in a big way for the wealthiest while still claiming, correctly, that he was shifting taxes to the wealthy. Bush covered up his gift to the uber-elite by dishing out a little pain to the kinda-elite.

And so with a bit of maneuvering and a lot of carefully couched phrases, Bush pulled wool over the eyes of most of America. The punchline came in 2004. At election time, long after the country club set should have noticed that their boy George had turned on them, the upper middle class turned out in huge numbers to give Georgie a second term. Their time and money built Bush’s campaign, and their votes sealed the deal. How’s that for irony?

This story makes me laugh because it sounds so much like another story that has gotten a lot more play in the media and in campus political circles. Harvard students have no trouble accepting the idea that rural, God-fearing po’ folk have made some ridiculous error and voted for the party that makes their lives miserable. We look out over middle America and say, “Well, Buffy, I guess they’re just too dumb to vote Democrat. If only they realized that Republicans are using social issues to delude them, then they’d have healthcare and everything would be fine.” But at least rural voters get something for their vote. They may get hurt by Republican economic policies, but they get a government that holds the values they hold and hates the people they hate. It may not buy healthcare, but it’s something.

Upper middle class voters get screwed twice. They lose money when Bush sells them out to pay for tax cuts for the uber-rich. Then they lose dignity when they find themselves with a government that hates their values and holds all the prejudices they learned to give up while in college. The upper middle class is far more likely than the poor to hold progressive beliefs on things like abortion and gay rights. When they vote for Republicans, they are voting against both their economic interests and their social beliefs. So next time you’re wondering how poor people could be dumb enough to vote Republican, look into your own future and laugh. We have found the idiots, and they is us.


Samuel M. Simon ’06 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears regularly.