Delaware Dem

Wednesday Open Thread [5.27.15]

First Read: “By itself, making money shouldn’t be an issue for Bill and Hillary Clinton; after all, so many of our past presidents have been wealthy. By itself, Bill Clinton having a shell LLC wouldn’t be an issue either. But when you add the two together, you see that the Clintons have a Mitt Romney problem on their hands — wealth and ‘otherness’ that voters might not be able to relate to, especially when the likes of Bernie Sanders are campaigning against wealth.”

“Of course, there’s one BIG difference between Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney: Romney wanted to cut taxes for the wealthy, while Hillary likely wants to raise them and eliminate tax loopholes benefitting the well-off. As the Clintons have said before, people like them should be paying more in taxes. And you probably won’t hear that rhetoric from the eventual GOP nominee.”

The voters won’t care. They only care when someone who is wealthy wants to cut taxes for him so as to further enrich himself at the expense of the voters. If a candidate who is wealthy wants to raise taxes on himself or herself while at the same providing benefits and services to the voter as a result, the voters will lap that right up. Remember the Kennedy’s. They were fabulously wealthy. But also liberal.

To get elected as a rich person in this country, you better be a liberal Democrat.

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Ken Simpler: Advocate for the 1%, Taxing Everyone Else.

Celia Cohen fellates Ken Simpler and supply side economics once more in reporting on the Revenue Commission’s findings:

They also found, as Markell had, retirees are getting a sweet deal through an assortment of tax breaks that ought to be revisited. They concluded it was fine for the state to rely on personal income taxes and corporate franchise taxes and fees as the mainstays of its revenue, although the personal income taxes could stand to have itemized deductions eliminated and the top marginal rate lowered.

What they decided the state could use, though, was another steady revenue source. They identified a property tax as the best candidate, especially because Delaware has one of the lowest property tax burdens in the country. Nobody should get too excited yet about this idea, one way or the other. Here is where it pays to remember Markell’s remark about the difference between the math and the politics. Other suggestions: Eliminate the estate tax. Shave the corporate income tax but nudge up the gross receipts tax. Recalibrate the realty transfer tax.

There was one last conclusion to be drawn. People ought to pay attention to that Ken Simpler guy. He appears to be the driving force behind a lot of the analysis.

No shit. Eliminating the Estate Tax, cutting the corporate income tax rate, eliminating itemized deductions (like your mortgage deduction) and lowering the top marginal rate (which is already at 6.6% starting at the $60,000 net injcome)??? All horrible conservative ideas that are giveaways to the wealthy and that will further deprive this state of revenue, all the while raising taxes on everyone else.

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Tuesday Open Thread [5.26.15]

Ed Kilgore of the Washington Monthly on that Gallup poll that showed that America is now a liberal nation.

That in itself is significant, but if you add partisanship into the mix, the change is even more significant. As recently as 2009, 31% of self-identified Democrats also self-identified as “conservative” or “very conservative” on “social issues.” That was a bit of an outlier, but the number was in the low twenties earlier. Now it’s at 14%, even as the “liberal/very liberal” total has spiked to an all-time high of 53%. There’s been a smaller but still significant shift among Republicans from “conservative’/very conservative” to “moderate,” but the overall trend is being driven by Democrats.

So whatever else this means, it means the temptation for Democrats to carve out some sort of “economic liberal/social conservative” position, which was very strong in the 1980s and 1990s in some culturally conservative areas of the country (typically those with a lot of white working class voters who retained enough union influence to keep them from defecting to the GOP entirely), has now pretty much vanished. And that’s evident in the fact that most “struggles for the soul of the Democratic Party” these days are focused on economic issues.

What we have here in Delaware is the Social Liberal Economic Conservative model in Jack Markell, Tom Carper, Chris Coons and John Carney.

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Saturday Open Thread [5.23.15]

It looks like the heavily Catholic Ireland has just become the first country on the planet to enact marriage equality by popular vote rather than by legislation, judicial order or royal decree. Probably because Irish Catholics are more intelligent and in tune with that Jesus said about homosexuality (i.e. nothing) than the conservative heirarchy that likes to look to Old Testament’s Leviticus than anything Jesus Christ said.

Ireland appears to have voted heavily in favor of allowing same-sex marriage in a historic referendum that marks a dramatic social shift in the traditionally Catholic country, government ministers and opponents of the bill said on Saturday. Final results are not expected until later in the day in a vote that would make Ireland the first country to adopt same-sex marriage via a popular vote, just two decades after the country decriminalised homosexuality. State broadcaster RTE said the victory appeared to be overwhelming and government minister Kevin Humphreys predicted the margin would be two-to-one.

“I think it’s won,” Equality Minister Aodhan O’Riordain told Reuters at the main count center in Dublin. “The numbers of people who turned out to vote is unprecedented. This has really touched a nerve in Ireland today.”

Gay marriage is backed by all political parties, championed by big employers and endorsed by celebrities, all hoping it will mark a transformation in a country that was long regarded as one of the most socially conservative in Western Europe.

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Friday Open Thread [5.22.15]

For the first time since polling began in 1999, Gallup found that there are more social liberals in the United States than social conservatives.

Gallup reported that the number of respondents who called themselves social liberals has increased to 31%, while the number of self-identified social conservatives has fallen to 30%. The number of Democrats who refer to themselves as social liberals jumped from 47% in 2014 to 53% in 2015. The number of Republicans who call themselves socially conservative has declined from 60% in 2014 to 53% in 2015.

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