More comfortable
Pence said things at a conservative student event called Turning Point USA today, COVID be damned.
One of the things he said is that Democrats want to make poor people more comfortable.
He says it beginning at 1:29.
It’s pretty staggering that he feels happy saying that the enemy party wants to make poor people more comfortable. What does Pence want? What does his party want? Poor people homeless, eating out of garbage cans, sick, dying young?
I consulted Google, and it appears that he’s said variations on it before, including saying that Dems want to make poverty more comfortable. That provides a hint toward how Republicans make this a cheerful doctrine: if you make poverty as uncomfortable and lethal as possible then poor people will stop being so stupid about it and be rich instead.
Here’s one reason that’s horseshit: rich people get rich via the labor of poor people. The lower the wages the more money for The Rich People. Poor people are not poor because poverty is so damn comfortable, it’s because rich people suppress wages every way they can.
What Pence of course means by “Democrats want to make rich people poorer and poor people more comfortable” is that the left, and some Democrats, want to reduce the massive equality gap in the US. Yes, oddly enough, we do want people to get decent pay for their work, and support when they need it, and if that means The Moneybags Family don’t get to buy their fifth Vacation Home in Aspen, so be it.
I dunno about Democrats but that’s actually a true assessment of a lot of left wing thinking… I fail to see how this is a bad thing.
Michael Parenti wrote that there are two groups in America, group A (investors/owners) and group B (workers), and the only thing the two groups have in common is that they both live off the labour of group B.
Well, you see, if poor people are more comfortable, they won’t have incentive to work for next to no money for rich people! Then where would rich people be? (Poor? Probably not.)
Plus there’s the prosperity gospel thing, the idea that the rich are rich because they are beloved of God. Why should we make the poor, who obviously are hated by God, comfortable? They are being punished. (I hate prosperity gospel, by the way.)
Plus…taxes. The rich simply do not believe they should pay as much in taxes as the poor. The Dems don’t cut taxes on the rich like the GOP does.
Arguably, our economy has become so abstract and so financialized that the wealthy don’t really live off labor per se anymore. They live off RENTS. Ever more arcane investment structures that don’t even have much to do with the “real” economy anymore. An example that was given is Facebook. Facebook is a massive, multibillion dollar company. But the number of employees, Class B people, is trivial. And the economy is becoming increasingly abstract and de-populated. Amazon….replaces millions of retailers with local employees with an increasingly automated, drone-delivered, and centralized distribution system. And stock ownership is extremely concentrated.
Ultimately, of course, even the Vampire Squids need someone to buy the goods and services. (Although an increasing percentage of the economy is business to business services) But an Asian middle class can serve that role better than the left behind American working class.
I think his actual quote was, “Are there no prisons? And the Union workhouses?”
Very seasonally appropriate, though I have no faith in his Christmas Eve redemption.
The aristos are back… Everything Thomas Paine was railing against over two hundred years ago is exactly the same only we don’t call them kings and lords anymore. Of course he was talking about taxation, but it was decidedly regressive taxation.
Well yes and no…they may no longer directly ‘earn’ their billions from the physical labour of miners and factory workers, but they still need people to build their toys, prepare their food, sew their clothes and clean their houses; they are still literally living off the labour of others. It’s weird to me to hear people talking about things like financialisation and the ‘knowledge economy’–in a student/teacher setting, I ask ‘do you think more things are being made now, or fewer? Do you think there are more or fewer people doing jobs like cleaning and cooking and repairing?’ The knowledge economy hasn’t replaced the economy of physical things, it’s augmented and obscured it.
guest: I certainly agree with you. Heck, at the very base of the economy is AGRICULTURE. But not all that many people are needed as farmers anymore. And, the big money is now made off financialized “investment” products. I agree that the investment economy is parasitical on the “real” economy-but it is the major source of profits.
As for “building their toys”…automation and off shoring serves that need, largely. Hence my reference to the Asian middle class. Small as it may be in China, and based on cheap labor. Heck, even China is off-shoring some production to even cheaper and (most importantly) even more oppressive (to labor….not to capital as long as the foreign capitalists cut the Burmese military in on their deals) countries like Myanmar.