(08-10-2022 03:04 PM)WalkThePlank Wrote: Exactly. No way the IRS goes after the $200K+ HH income bracket, that's their base of voters...along with the losers who don't want to work.
The target will be middle class HH income, married filing jointly. That $100-$199K section where the entire middle class is. Ironically voted for DJT over Biden 57-41%.
The donks are becoming the party of two constituencies:
1) The super-rich, who believe that they can best maintain their lifestyle of privilege by throwing enough handouts at the extremely poor to keep them in line, while using tax and regulatory policies to keep the upwardly mobile from crashing their party ("let them eat cake"); and
2) The non-working welfare class, who will combine handouts with their ability to game the system in order to live better than they could by getting jobs.
It's both ends of, "Keep 'em dumb, keep 'em poor, keep 'em dependent on handouts, and you can keep 'em voting democrat." They tax those in between the two extremes enough to buy enough votes from group 2 to keep group 1 insulated. It's the elite experts versus common sense struggle that George Friedman has written about.
It seems to me that should leave the door wide open for the republicans to take the populist conservative side of common sense and become the party of choice for those in, say, the $50,000-$200,000 income range. And there are way more of them than there are the patrician elite and no-working welfare classes combined.
Donald Trump tapped into that and in so doing scared the bejeezus out of both the establishment donks and phants. Unfortunately Trump came with a lot of negative baggage that left him vulnerable to attacks by the establishment Deep State/Blob, and more unfortunately he was unprepared to defend himself effectively against those attacks (and Jeff Sessions did not help).
I want the republicans, starting immediately if not sooner, to stake out a strong position as the party of common sense. A populist conservative movement that appeals to the makers in society as opposed to the takers who either don't work or don't have to because of their riches.
A very simple set of concepts to live by:
Domestic policy: A basic floor of universal private health care and subsistence income for all, but above that people who work should live better than people who don't.
Foreign policy: Treat your friends better than you treat your enemies.
Military policy: Be the biggest and baddest, by far, but never have to use it because nobody dares pick on us and we never fight a war that we don't intend to win.
Adopt policies which fit that template and don't go off message, and I think that will win big.