In dissecting Tuesday’s presidential results, Kevin D. Williamson of National Review identifies several Ohio-specific factors. One observation: “Class warfare works.”
It is juvenile and it is economically illiterate, but a fair number of Americans worked themselves up into a lather over Mitt Romney’s paying a relatively low tax rate. Taxing capital gains at a lower rate than wages has been for a long time a mostly uncontroversial economic policy with fairly wide support across the partisan and ideological spectrum. When Bill Clinton signed into a law a reduction in the capital-gains tax rate, there was no mutiny on the left. More broadly, most voters do not have anything like the economic sophistication even to understand what Romney did at Bain Capital, much less how such private-equity firms provide real economic benefits. These are the citizens Bastiat had in mind when he wrote about what is seen and what is unseen: They can see outsourcing and declining manufacturing employment, but they cannot see (at least not very clearly) the benefits associated with integrated global supply chains or increases in manufacturing productivity. It may not be possible to be too thin, but it is, apparently, possible to be too rich, at least for an electorate that can be swayed by envy. ?
