even before the tax was cut by Bush only like 2% of estates were taxed. hardly the middle. your estate has to be millions ($23MM according to the article) for this to even begin mattering.
$23MM+ is the middle, though. Upper middle, but still middle.
You're not really a power player in national politics until you are a billionaire (i.e. the top 1%), and that's where the real power inequality lies. For example, Sheldon Adelson recently pledged to drop $100MM into Trump's 2020 campaign, and like the article mentions, he "used a different strategy involving trusts to avoid $2.8 billion in estate and gift taxes between 2010 and 2013".
There is no universe in which $23MM+ is "middle class". If you have that much money, you can live passively off of investment income basically for the rest of time.
> Sheldon Adelson recently pledged to drop $100MM into Trump's 2020 campaign
Okay but Tom Steyer (also a billionaire) spent $343M on his election, and won a humiliating 0.38% of the popular vote (0% of pledged delegates).
This universe. The upper class has become effectively hidden by the language we use to describe power dynamics in this country. And this is a problem because if they are hidden, then they can't be held accountable.
Yes, you can live passively on $23MM, but you can't influence national or global politics with your wealth, which is my point. Hence you do not wield the most power, hence you do not hold the most accountability. And sure, not all billionaires are created equal, but that doesn't disprove my point.
> you can't influence national or global politics with your wealth, which is my point.
> And sure, not all billionaires are created equal, but that doesn't disprove my point.
If your point is that billionaires can influence national or global politics by virtue of their wealth alone — that's a pretty steep claim and the burden of proof to substantiate it is on you.
Nevertheless, I'll try to show you why the empirical evidence is simply not in your favor.
Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump by 2x in the 2016 election, and still lost. In fact, she had far more corporate backing than Donald Trump, and still lost.
In the 2020 Democratic Primaries, Michael Bloomberg spent $1 billion (!!) on his campaign, and won just 9.4% of the popular vote (1.38% of pledged delegates).
As I already pointed out, Tom Steyer spent $343 million on his election, and won 0.38%. Interestingly, you would think he would have at least 1/3 of Bloomberg's vote, which suggests that the vast majority of the variance in Bloomberg's vote share can be attributed to his existing name recognition as a famous businessman/politician, and not simply the money. No amount of money was enough to make their core message resonate with ordinary voters.
Bernie Sanders spent $195 million on his election, having spent less than Bloomberg + Steyer and while having handily beaten both. Joe Biden spent $105 million on his campaign, less than Bernie, and still beat him by 3 million votes (and counting).
Elizabeth Warren spent $121.31 million on her campaign, and also handily beat Bloomberg + Steyer while having spent far less than them, while losing to Biden while having spent more than him.
Those are just the anecdotes (of which there are many more).
Decades of research[1] suggest that money probably isn’t the deciding factor in who wins a general election, and especially not for incumbents. Most of the research in the last century found[2] that spending didn’t affect wins for incumbents and that the impact for challengers was unclear[3]. Even the studies[4] that showed spending having the biggest effect, like one that found a more than 6 percent increase in vote share for incumbents, didn’t demonstrate that money actually causes wins. In a time period where voters are more stridently partisan, there are probably fewer and fewer people who are going to change their vote simply because they liked your ad.
While you may be right that money affords one the platform to disseminate their ideologies, at the end of the day, ordinary voters need to accept that ideology, go to the ballot box, and check the box next to the name. If I'm a left wing progressive, no amount of money will convince me to vote for a right wing politician (and vice versa). No amount of money will install a leader that cannot convince voters to vote for them in a democratic election. As such, the claim that $23MM+ is "middle class" continues to be beyond bizarre.
Agree with your points, but it's not about affecting who wins by campaign spending so much as it is controlling the winner after they've won, because then you own them. This is why lobbyists will donate to both sides.
> Compared to economic elites, average voters have a low to nonexistent influence on public policies. “Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions, they have little or no independent influence on policy at all,” the authors conclude. [1]
> much as it is controlling the winner after they've won
But they can only win re-election if (and only if) their constituents believe that they continue to represent their interests.
Also, direct donations to campaigns run by the candidates themselves are ALREADY capped, both for individuals as well as corporations. It is only uncapped for organizations that are not affiliated with the candidate directly (SuperPACs), and this is strictly regulated.
So the point that you're making is: upon winning the 2016 election, if a bunch of billionaires promised Trump that they would donate to an unaffiliated SuperPAC for his 2020 re-election bid if Trump enacted policies opposite to what he campaigned on, he might be able to win his re-election. There is no evidence of this happening. Trump's base will refuse to vote for him if he flip-flopped on his immigration stances.
Like I said, people with $23MM net worth aren't influencing national elections with their wealth, though. That's what puts them in middle -- they may live a luxurious life, but they have very little real power.
You'd seem to prefer we ignore the existence of the ultra-wealthy, without appreciating the massively outsized influence they have. By pretending they don't exist or don't matter, you are holding them unaccountable for the power they wield on a national, and global scale. Yet they have the most responsibility to bear when it comes to inequality.
So you can scapegoat the middle class, but you're just doing a favor to those ultra-rich who hold real power, by eliminating their potential middle competitors for them. This is the high + low vs middle power dynamic.
I don't think it's unreasonable to define the upper class as the group who wields the most political power. Use whatever word you want, "overlord", "elite", "oligarch", it doesn't matter. You seem to be playing semantic word games to avoid addressing my central point.
I'm entirely comfortable with noting there's a special category of super-rich, mega-wealthy, upper-upper class, top 0.1%, whatever you want to call it.
Calling someone with $23M net worth "upper middle" class remains absurd.
you can't use a non-standard definition of a word and then complain others are playing word games.
you seem to think all that matters is inequality in political power but I think inequality in, say, quality of life, protection under the law or healthcare are also important and those exist well below the 0.01% (and in non-wealth dimensions).
Also, I'm nowhere near the top 0.01% but I do donate a good amount to political campaigns and I regularly get personal calls from congress people (presumably expecting more money). I don't think people in the bottom 50% get such calls.
Wikipedia's definition includes those who "wield the most political power", so I don't think it's non-standard, per se. Although, I have complained elsewhere in this thread that the language we use to describe class and power obscures the existence of "elites" who hold the most influence.
Because elite power is hidden, it becomes unaccountable. You can scapegoat the "upper class" asshole with a Lamborghini and infinity pool, but that's obscuring the massive influence of figures like the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson.
I completely agree with you that protection under the law, healthcare, etc, are important and should be rectified. But the people who are ultimately deciding that are the ultra wealthy elites [1]. So taxing multi-millionaires is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, rather than addressing inequality in a meaningful way.
To do this, elite power must be held accountable. To be held accountable, it must be seen, and not made invisible by "word games".
according to gallup polling between 1-3% of people self-identify as upper class. no matter your definition that's gonna include people with merely $20MM in wealth.
and i'll add that $20MM definitely gets you regular lunch with congresspeople and maybe even a ride on airforce one (I know someone who donated enough to Trump to get this and isn't a billionaire).
Well, it's not a well defined term, that's part of the problem. I think it's worth the effort to challenge the language used to describe class and power, though, because the terminology omits the existence of the elite. I've addressed that elsewhere in the thread so won't rehash it again here, but it has revealed to me some of the weird psychological barriers in place preventing the rehabilitation of the language we use. For one, the middle doesn't want admit to themselves how far they truly are from actual power and prefer to think of themselves as high or near-high. Second, the shear exponential scale of the power disparity between the middle and high is hard to comprehend.
>You're not really a power player in national politics until you are a billionaire (i.e. the top 1%)
the 1% of wealth starts at $10MM. wealth inequality creates important power inequality way before you start dropping $100MM on a presidential campaign.
