US Politics Thread

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ChicagoBlue said:
I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, America is a conglomeration of different “countries,”’all of which are very different, have different geography, different cultures, and different politics…both historically and currently.

However, the one constant is that the more money you have, the more you can either insulate from or ingratiate yourself into the vagaries of those politics.

I have spent my entire working life here trying to figure out the “how much” and “where” that will help me live the kind of retired life I can enjoy…all while I have been living close to work, by my wife’s family, in a nice village, but paying an arm & a leg to do it for the last 30 years, so my kids had a good life and their American family close by!

Houses are $600,000+, property taxes are $15,000 a year, sales taxes are 10% (12% on non-grocery food), state income taxes are 5%, village sticker for each car is another $100 apiece, and that’s all on top of the federal Income taxes. Yeah, “it keeps out the riff-raff,” as they say, but it bleeds and bleeds and bleeds you dry while you’re trying to get ahead.

And I know I’m one of the very lucky ones.
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Which of course explains why the poor seem so keen on voting for the rich.
 
ChicagoBlue said:
Americans are aspirational. Brits might not understand this thinking.
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Aspiration we understand. The American Dream seems a triumph of delusional hope over experience. "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is a noble aspiration, but how old do you have to be before you realise you're not going to get rich?
 
Vic said:
Aspiration we understand. The American Dream seems a triumph of delusional hope over experience. "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is a noble aspiration, but how old do you have to be before you realise you're not going to get rich?
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Tens of millions of Americans, native and foreign born, would disagree with your sweeping indictment.

Yes, things get more expensive over time but one hopes to outpace inflation by working hard and smart. I am a prime example, and I know of many others who didn’t come from any significant advantage but have done well for themselves.

A good friend of mine who has his own aircraft, no mortgage and two Teslas (S & X) is so unassuming you wouldn’t give him a second look, yet he’s a multi-millionaire I went to school with who just worked hard and smart…and he’s cheap until it matters!

In fact, I told him we were going out in a few days so he could buy me dinner and he still says, “but I’m just a poor white child from Massachusetts!”…because he was!

Those stories are everywhere, but there are more headlines in the other end of that spectrum, so we dwell on that.

EDIT: He sold his Model S for a matte grey 2022 Mercedes EQS.
 
ChicagoBlue said:
Tens of millions of Americans, native and foreign born, would disagree with your sweeping indictment.

Yes, things get more expensive over time but one hopes to outpace inflation by working hard and smart. I am a prime example, and I know of many others who didn’t come from any significant advantage but have done well for themselves.

A good friend of mine who has his own aircraft, no mortgage and two Teslas (S & X) is so unassuming you wouldn’t give him a second look, yet he’s a multi-millionaire I went to school with who just worked hard and smart…and he’s cheap until it matters!

In fact, I told him we were going out in a few days so he could buy me dinner and he still says, “but I’m just a poor white child from Massachusetts!”…because he was!

Those stories are everywhere, but there are more headlines in the other end of that spectrum, so we dwell on that.

EDIT: He sold his Model S for a matte grey 2022 Mercedes EQS.
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What indictment?

Perhaps the headlines at the "poor" end of the spectrum are because about 0.5% of Americans own a Tesla. I assume you're not saying that, when everyone says Trump won because of the cost of living, people vote for Trump because they hope to drive a Tesla.
 
Vic said:
What indictment?

Perhaps the headlines at the "poor" end of the spectrum are because about 0.5% of Americans own a Tesla. I assume you're not saying that, when everyone says Trump won because of the cost of living, people vote for Trump because they hope to drive a Tesla.
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Even more own pick-up trucks.

I don’t think of Trump’s voters’ selection of him as a striving of his support base for the nation to be better off — I look at it as a pool of people who aren’t where they perceive others are financially, believe a certain subset of people/politicians are exclusively to blame (not themselves), and see Trump as their angel of retribution who won’t necessarily restore their own glory, but will make the perpetrators of his voters’ unhappiness suffer.

Socially, they’ve been brought up in and grounded themselves in a socio-religious construct which the left has deemed morally-wanting — anti-DEI, anti-immigrant, anti-abortion rights, anti-LGTBQ wide-scale rights and acceptance. It’s okay to be black, foreign, childless and gay as long as they know you personally and you’ve been deemed acceptable company — that you “fit in.” But not as a class — only individuals. As such, they don’t just feel looked down upon, but perceive that they’ve been told their beliefs are “wrong” morally. That raises hackles.

It doesn’t help the rest of us that, despite the vast majority of Trump supporters like being conservative but not extreme, that the vast majority of the GOP — Trump included — has often hemmed and hawed about the support of extremists for fear of offending them. Imagine not wanting to offend the KKK.

Anyhow, even those who @Username Required mentioned — his friends and neighbors — focus on these aspects, and they don’t sound anything like poor or destitute or bigoted or desperately yearning for a better life. Their primary motivations are fear-based, as he noted. And it’s 100% addition by subtraction — a zero sum game. Nearly every plank of the GOP’s platform has “others suffering” as a component. Read it. I did.
 
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