I'm A Hater - Hater

More MSM fisking: E.J. Dionne Jr. has an article in WaPo today that appears at first blush to be reasonable. It's not.

Dionne begins with some statistics, and draws an incorrect conclusion:

In the 2004 election, according to the main media exit poll, President Bush won 63 percent of the votes cast by Americans in households earning over $200,000 a year, and 57 percent from those in the $100,000 to $200,000 range. All things being equal, wealthier people vote Republican.

Wrong. After a certain level, wealth tends to swing people back to voting Democratic (sorry: I don't know the source, but this was widely reported). Much of Dionne's point still holds, but it's still an abuse of statistics.

The gist of the article is that poor (red) states have greater income inequality than rich (blue) states, and that in rich states, voting is less correlated with earnings (or 'class', as Dionne presumptively infers) than in poor ones. But wait: in poor states, where supposedly Republicans are the party of the rich, they win. That doesn't make sense. A poor state with high inequality necessarily has a few wealthy people and a lot of poor ones. So there should be lots of Democrats and few (rich) Republicans. But Dionne isn't going to be bothered by math. Instead, he has this to say:

Southern Republicans such as President Bush pursue policies that are hugely beneficial to their wealthy base even as they try to diminish the political impact of class warfare by shifting the argument to other subjects: religion, values or national security.

First of all, as argued above, the idea that a successful party could have a base of rich people in a poor state is silly. Second, since when is it bad to be nice to rich people? Ceteris paribus, does Dionne endorse policies that hurt the rich? The real class warfare that's going on here is inside Dionne's head: he assumes that "good for the rich" is equivalent to "bad for everyone else", and assumes that his readers share the first assumption. The assumption may be valid in some cases, but not in others. Take the Bush tax cuts: there are lots of different metrics one can use, but everyone's taxes decreased and after the cuts the wealthy paid a higher percentage of taxes than before. That is, the tax cuts made our code more, not less, progressive, while benefiting all taxpayers.

Bush, of course, has avoided letting the other shoe fall by not cutting spending. If he did, he would have to make hard decisions about whom to hurt. But that doesn't let Dionne off the hook. That is to say, Dionne assumes that Bush is a class warrior and that most of his trademark issues are "shifting the argument". But since Bush is winning in poor states, he must have a base that includes lots of poor voters to whom those issues are paramount. And why would these poor voters vote for things that help the rich? Precisely because they, unlike Dionne, are not class warriors.