Americans just too dumb to know they're dumb losers and need the govt to watch over them - I think thats a common leftwing view anyway.
Most Americans Are Hopeful, Not Envious
ESTATE TAX, TAX CUTS
Even now, House liberals are strategizing about a final effort to amend the bill extending the Bush tax cut to raise its death tax provision from 35% to 45% and lower its threshold from $5 million to $3.5 million.
William McGurn, in Wall Street Journal editorial yesterday, pointed out that the democrat’s obsessive animosity toward private wealth is not, in fact, an attitude shared by most ordinary Americans, wealthy or non-wealthy. Americans admire achievement and tend to believe people are entitled to enjoy the fruits of their own effort or even of mere good fortune unmolested.
For all the talk about “fairness,” Mr. Obama, Mr. Sanders and their fellow Democrats never really tell us what the magic number for fairness is. Is it 35% of income? 50%? 75%? Though they never commit themselves to an actual number, in each and every case we get the same answer: Taxes should be higher than they are now, for their own sake.
Americans are a more hopeful and less envious people than that. We are now hearing from them. Thus the heart of the tea party’s objections to the Beltway status quo is fundamentally a moral one: that Washington is arrogant about how it takes and spends our money.
The American people understand this. It’s not just tea partiers or those who work on Wall Street. Many years ago, the activist Michael Harrington—he, like Mr. Sanders, a self-declared socialist—wrote about the experience a friend of his had while campaigning in 1972 for George McGovern among the mostly black and Latina workers of New York City’s garment district.
Harrington told his friend that he must have had an easy time selling the candidate, given Mr. McGovern’s proposal for a 100% tax on every dollar over $500,000 of inheritance. This, Harrington thought, must have especially appealed to garment workers laboring for very low pay.
The friend informed Harrington how wrong he was: “Those underpaid women . . . were outraged that the government would confiscate the money they would hand down to their children if they made a million dollars.” No matter how he tried to tell these garment workers how unlikely they ever were to see a million dollars in their lifetimes, they couldn’t get past the idea that the government would take it from them if they did.
neveryetmelted.com
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This reminds me of a statistic cited in Jeremy Rifkin's 2004 book, The European Dream, originally taken from the Pew Global Attitudes project.
"two-thirds of Americans believe that success is not outside their control. In Germany, 68% answered the exact opposite way.... By more than six to one, Americans believe failure is the result of the individual, not society… 71% of Americans believe people can escape from poverty. Only 40% of Europeans believe the same....Asked why people are wealthy, 64 percent of Americans say [it is] because of personal drive, willingness to take risks, and hard work and initiative." And why do others fail? When asked that question, 64 percent of Americans cited a lack of thrift, 53 percent ascribed the failure (at least in part) to a lack of effort, and a like percentage said that failure was due to lack of ability. ..... but “in Europe, a majority in every country – with the exception of the U.K., Czech Republic, and Slovakia – ‘believe that forces outside of an individual’s personal control determine success.'"
Having lived in Germany, I find this poll to be quite apt.
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