The elections of 2014 and the Reckoning

Carteach leaves a comment to yesterday's post about how Obamacare is screwing over the Middle Class, and the implication for the Democrats in next year's elections:

I suspect the Democrats will do fine in the upcoming elections.

Trained barking seals seldom turn on their trainers, as long as there is even the smell of a dead fish around.

That's the typical calculus, and a not bad analysis in general.  Certainly it underlies the Democrats' strategy of buying off favored interest groups for votes.  The problem is that it fails here.  Mencius summed this up pretty well, speaking in generalities:

There are three basic attitudes toward government in America today. There are people who believe government is there to serve them; there are people who believe government is there to serve others; there are people who believe government is there to subsidize them. In our medieval metaphor, these correspond to peasants, gentlemen, and varlets respectively. The last is the caste Marx called the "lumpenproletariat" - and he was no fan of this group, or of political movements that exploited it. Respectable people say "underclass."

When gentlemen look at progressivism, they see a movement whose purpose is to help the underclass, those whose plight is no fault of their own. When peasants look at progressivism, they see a movement whose purpose is to employ gentlemen in the business of public policy, by using the peasants' money to buy votes from varlets. Who, in the peasants' perception, abuse the patience and generosity of both peasants and gentlemen in almost every imaginable way, and are constantly caressed by every imaginable authority for doing so.

The Middle Class are the peasants here, and Obamacare will vastly increase the cost of their health care, in order to fund a big government vote buying scheme for the underclass.  A movement whose purpose is to employ gentlemen in the business of public policy, by using the peasants' money to buy votes from varlets.

When you consider that the median American family pays essentially no Federal Income Tax but still shells out 25% of their gross income in tax payments, Obamacare by itself looks like it may double that.

Let that sink in for a moment.  The median income family may see their out of pocket taxes (at all levels: Federal, State, and local) go from 25% of their pre-tax income to a cool 50%.

Nobody's vote is getting bought here.  The Middle Class is not just seeing the biggest tax increase in history*, but are seeing their taxes double due to Obamacare.  All so that the Democrats can buy some votes from some other people.

The Middle Class will be incandescent with rage come election day next year.  There's no spin in the world that will cool that rage.  That anger will be so profound that very likely millions of voters will show up at the voting booth.  They won't be there for revenge.  Oh no.

They'll be there for a Reckoning.



* Yes, I know it's not a "tax", it's insurance payments. The only reason that insurance rates are changing is because of the new law, and the only reason that the law of the land stood the test of a Supreme Court challenge is because SCOTUS said (in John Robert's masterful majority opinion) is that Congress had the power to do this via the taxing clause in the Constitution. Walk, quack, duck.