Despite the glaring facts that (a) income never predicted voting well, and (b) higher income now probably predicts lower Republican voting, many people remain convinced that the foundation of NIMBYism is objective self-interest. So wrong.
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I think this really misses the mark.
My experience has been that lots of professionals basically work for the government. This may be indirectly (as a contractor or as a company where government is a payer), but I would guess that most professionals today are basically dependent on the government for their income. That income can be quite high, and in many cases higher than it would otherwise be without the government!
So it's not obvious to me that people who make a lot of money would want say lower taxes, especially if their salaries depend on higher taxes. Do teachers vote against the school taxes? When tax cuts go directly to them (say the SALT deduction) people who ordinarily call for taxing the rich know how to butter their own bread.
The GOP basically represents the interest of the middle class uncredentialed and successful small time bourgeois.
BTW, for incomes above $100,000 Trump won 54/42 (60/39 among whites).
Among whites with *no degree* making $100k+ Trump won 73%.
Among whites with *a degree* making $100k+ Trump only got 51%.
People are voting their self interest, but in a world where almost 50% of GDP is government spending an incredible amount of "high income" people are basically government workers.
"Despite the glaring facts that (a) income never predicted voting well, and (b) higher income now probably predicts lower Republican voting, many people remain convinced that the foundation of NIMBYism is objective self-interest. So wrong."
I think there's a near mode/far mode issue here that challenges this line of reasoning. Most politics is far mode - your vote for taxes to go up or down is not going to affect whether your taxes go up or down, so you can vote to make yourself feel good, without actually giving anything up. Very far mode.
Zoning regulation is very local though. If a developer asks the city to turn the McMansion next to yours into a 15 dwelling walk up, posters get put up in your neighborhood and you can go to a meeting to make your voice heard. You can get a few of your neighbors together and materially affect the chances that the change will be made. Much more near mode than almost all other political issues.
There is another crucial factor besides deregulation though--the growth of Social Security/Medicare/etc. entitlements over the past sixty years has been taking a steadily growing share of GDP at the expense of the share devoted to investment in private capital goods. One can't "build, baby, build" or even just maintain current levels of labor productivity and compensation in real terms when we are continually trying to run a capitalist economic system without capital goods.
The toxic combination of automatically increasing appropriations for entitlements and fiat money financing of deficits has been deindustrializing America and much of the rest of the industrialized world as well, with some countries (like Japan) now depopulating as well. Even Republicans who aren't pro-Establishment Uniparty sellouts can't bring themselves to face the reality of how fiat money and government promises of "economic security" have been undermining the productive sector of our economy, let alone the grim prognosis it portends for the future of America.
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Despite the glaring facts that (a) income never predicted voting well, and (b) higher income now probably predicts lower Republican voting, many people remain convinced that the foundation of NIMBYism is objective self-interest. So wrong.
---
I think this really misses the mark.
My experience has been that lots of professionals basically work for the government. This may be indirectly (as a contractor or as a company where government is a payer), but I would guess that most professionals today are basically dependent on the government for their income. That income can be quite high, and in many cases higher than it would otherwise be without the government!
So it's not obvious to me that people who make a lot of money would want say lower taxes, especially if their salaries depend on higher taxes. Do teachers vote against the school taxes? When tax cuts go directly to them (say the SALT deduction) people who ordinarily call for taxing the rich know how to butter their own bread.
The GOP basically represents the interest of the middle class uncredentialed and successful small time bourgeois.
BTW, for incomes above $100,000 Trump won 54/42 (60/39 among whites).
Among whites with *no degree* making $100k+ Trump won 73%.
Among whites with *a degree* making $100k+ Trump only got 51%.
People are voting their self interest, but in a world where almost 50% of GDP is government spending an incredible amount of "high income" people are basically government workers.
"Despite the glaring facts that (a) income never predicted voting well, and (b) higher income now probably predicts lower Republican voting, many people remain convinced that the foundation of NIMBYism is objective self-interest. So wrong."
I think there's a near mode/far mode issue here that challenges this line of reasoning. Most politics is far mode - your vote for taxes to go up or down is not going to affect whether your taxes go up or down, so you can vote to make yourself feel good, without actually giving anything up. Very far mode.
Zoning regulation is very local though. If a developer asks the city to turn the McMansion next to yours into a 15 dwelling walk up, posters get put up in your neighborhood and you can go to a meeting to make your voice heard. You can get a few of your neighbors together and materially affect the chances that the change will be made. Much more near mode than almost all other political issues.
There is another crucial factor besides deregulation though--the growth of Social Security/Medicare/etc. entitlements over the past sixty years has been taking a steadily growing share of GDP at the expense of the share devoted to investment in private capital goods. One can't "build, baby, build" or even just maintain current levels of labor productivity and compensation in real terms when we are continually trying to run a capitalist economic system without capital goods.
The toxic combination of automatically increasing appropriations for entitlements and fiat money financing of deficits has been deindustrializing America and much of the rest of the industrialized world as well, with some countries (like Japan) now depopulating as well. Even Republicans who aren't pro-Establishment Uniparty sellouts can't bring themselves to face the reality of how fiat money and government promises of "economic security" have been undermining the productive sector of our economy, let alone the grim prognosis it portends for the future of America.