What’s the Matter with Manhattan?

Back in 2002, a book hit the New York Times bestseller list called What’s the Matter with Kansas, by Thomas Frank. Frank’s working theory was that the middle class and poor of America’s heartland were being hornswoggled into believing that Republican ideas such as capitalism, strong families, and so on were good for them when clearly, according to Frank, they weren’t. Frank pointed to the various wealthy people around the country and told us that those were really the Republicans’ constituents and that they were just using us middle class rubes. The real answer was for us to vote our economic interests – which just happened to be the ones proposed by the Democrats. And across the various book reviews publications and standard lefty hangouts there was much rejoicing.

Problem is, Frank didn’t do his homework. The folks at the Heritage Foundation, on the other hand, did. That information, and a suggested new book that could follow, comes after the jump.

In a state-by-state, district-by-district comparison of wealth concentrations based on Internal Revenue Service income data, Michael Franc, vice president of government relations at the Heritage Foundation, found that the majority of the nation’s wealthiest congressional jurisdictions were represented by Democrats.

The numbers, according to this Franc, are pretty convincing. It turns out that the Democrats really are the party of wealth and privilege. This does make the Democrats’ signature “Tax the Rich” slogan a bit puzzling, since they are the rich. I’m tempted to write a book in response called “What’s the Matter with Manhattan?” and ruminate about why rich people in the Northeast and the West Coast are so willing to vote against their economic interests. But then I realize that the Dems aren’t talking about their rich. They’re talking about those middle-class small business owners and other folks who are working toward bettering their lives without smoking the crack-rock of government “assistance”. After all, the more folks who make their way into that strange mindset that so baffled Thomas Frank, the fewer people the Dems will have who’ll listen to their class warfare. One wonders if their constant pandering to the poor is just part of a yearning to return to the party’s halcyon days when it was the aristocracy and the underclasses knew their place.

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Category: Our New Democratic Overlords, The Economy and Your Money