My thoughts on Nazis are short, simple and not publishable in this paper. They’re also boring, because I assume they’re held by just about everyone who isn’t in the KKK, the White House or the Minecraft Let’s Play community.
What’s interesting is how we ended up with a man in the White House who stated, unprompted and on the record, that some torch-wielding people in a white supremacist flashmob are “very fine people.” Because the Republican Party, by and large, did nothing to stop the man. Most all Republicans voted for him. Most still support him. And, some, I assume, are good people.
One block I don’t count in that category are people who identify as “socially liberal, fiscally conservative.” The rest of this column is addressed to people who identify as such, explaining my reasons why.
I get it. You’ve seen people like Giuliani, Huckabee and Trump take over the party in recent years. You understand that the “isms” the SJWs whine about are real, and some policies proposed by people in your party definitely fit. You’d never dream of going to Charlottesville waving a torch and screaming at people of color. Some of your friends might be gay. You might even be gay. Heck, you’re only in this thing because of the taxes and the Democrats' insistence on handing over your hard-earned cash to welfare queens.
The problem is even GOP economic policy is racist in its intent and impact. Since you love economics and finance enough to define your political positions by it, let’s run through some basic things that you’ve probably already intuited, even if you don’t have the words to describe it. A company concerned with profit would never pay a worker more than they make for the company in revenue. In fact, you’d pay them less because if all workers were paid the value they added, there would be nothing left for the owner. So workers, as a whole, earn less than the people who own businesses, land and machinery — henceforth referred to as “capital.”
It’s why making your first million from nothing is viewed as an accomplishment to be proud of, but making a second million when you start with one million dollars is… less of a success story. You have your own money to invest in the stock market, other companies or your own. And the stock market’s average annual return rate means that you can make, on average, one million dollars a year by doing absolutely nothing but keeping some money in an index fund once you’re worth 14 million dollars.
Thus, already being rich is the easiest way to make a lot of money, so wealth tends to run in families. And most of those people and families, due to racist employment policies (and slavery) in the past and present, are white. Educational institutions, including the good ol’ U of SC, are often disproportionately white compared to the state they’re based in. Even the high-paying jobs that don’t require capital — like finance and tech — tend to have mostly white men in their workforces.
Since you’re socially liberal, I don’t have to explain that’s not because people of color or women are intellectually inferior to their white male counterparts. All of this means that only three of America’s 540 billionaires are black, and white people on average have more wealth and earn more money than black, latinx and Native American people in the United States.
So when we talk about policies that don’t punish people for having wealth and tax everyone equally, regardless of income, you end up with capital — largely owned by white people — sometimes paying less in taxes as a percentage of income than workers, who are disproportionately queer and non-white, and often struggling to make ends meet. This extends to how we talk about welfare.
We don’t talk about tax breaks for companies and the rich — such as the law that allows billionaire investors who make most of their money on the stock market to play a 15 or 20 percent tax rate — as welfare. We also don’t talk about policies that allow less rich people who still have money to spend, such as the mortgage deduction for homeowners, as welfare. But they still cost the government literally more than a trillion dollars a year when combined and leave that money in the hands of disproportionately white and already comfortable people.
At the same time the GOP relentlessly crusades against “welfare” for the poor. Not only do programs like subsidized housing and food stamps cost a relatively small amount of the federal budget, but they also largely serve to stop people from becoming unemployable due to malnutrition, homelessness or death, keeping the economy productive.
And, yeah, I did say death. People (largely of the poor, disproportionately non-white variety) died and still die from lack of healthcare — an area where fiscal conservatives in Congress constantly think that some money in the hands of rich white people is worth some dead people of color. Same goes for food stamps and subsidized housing, since food and shelter are sort of necessary for life the last time I checked. But I’m not a biology student, so I could be wrong on that.
So even if you’re socially liberal and abhor neo-Nazis and klansmen beating people of color to death with their fists, if you vote in fiscally conservative politicians you still end up killing them by slower, more civilized means.
And also drone strikes. But that’s another issue.