Edsall writes that the Democrat’s voters have become an hourglass shape of very well-off meritocratic knowledge workers and poor, often immigrant service workers. The middle clsss meanwhile is over voting for the GOP.
Reading the column you get the sense Edsall isn’t particularly worried about the income distribution aspects but is concerned about the former bidding up housing prices to the point where it drives the latter out of town. This has happened in San Francisco and other hyper-expensive locales. Edsall quotes Harvard economist Dani Rodrik:
In principle, greater inequality produces a demand for more redistribution. Democratic politicians should respond by imposing higher taxes on the wealthy and spending the proceeds on the less well off.And quotes Michael Lind of University of Texas, observing:
(In practice) democracies have moved in the opposite direction. The progressivity of income taxes has decreased, reliance on regressive consumption taxes has increased, and the taxation of capital has followed a global race to the bottom. Instead of boosting infrastructure investment, governments have pursued austerity policies that are particularly harmful to low-skill workers.
(The Brahmin Left) is not friendly to redistribution, because it believes in meritocracy — a world in which effort gets rewarded and low incomes are more likely to be the result of insufficient effort than poor luck.
(Democrats, in this scheme, have become the party of) the downtown and edge city elites and their supporting staff of disproportionately foreign-born, low-wage service workers.Exactly the plantation economy to which much of CA is moving. Or you could think of it as the Latin American model, ricos at the top, pobres at the bottom, not many in between.
