Friday, July 13, 2012

Obama v. Romney: which elite do you prefer?

James Surowiecki neatly summarizes Romney's issues related to Bain:
What Romney’s career shows, after all, is that once you’re at the top, you can keep being called C.E.O. even if you’re not even working at the company. You can get paid a hundred grand a year—chump change for Romney, to be sure, but twice the U.S. median income—while doing, by your own account, nothing at all for the company. You can build up an I.R.A. worth tens of millions of dollars when the maximum annual contribution is four thousand dollars. (Henry Blodget suggests here that Romney’s ownership of Bain Capital shares may explain how that I.R.A. could have legally gotten so big.) And, above all, if you manage a private-equity firm, you can reap the benefit of the carried-interest tax loophole and pay a much lower tax rate on your income than the vast majority of Americans, and you can continue to reap the benefit of that loophole even after you stop working for the firm. None of these things is illegal, but none of them are things that ordinary Americans can benefit from, and that’s the real scandal of Romney’s career at Bain.
It is different world that Romney comes from.

Not that Obama's world is all to familiar either.  The two candidates are both elitists in their own ways.  Their shared Ivy League elitism, for one; no wonder even the crooked Richard Nixon wanted to kick them in the nuts--he knew what that (lack of) elitist cred means.

The election, therefore, comes down to which kind of elitism voters prefer.  Strange, eh!
[While] you might think one or the other group more preferable or more offensive for reasons of politics, culture, or taste, you certainly cannot argue that either one of them is in close touch with "average" or "ordinary" or even "middle-class" people, however those terms might be defined. And although both they and their supporters may shout about "radical left-wing professors” on the one hand or "Gordon Gekko" on the other, neither Obama nor Romney can plausibly claim to be leading a populist revolution against the "elites" who are allegedly destroying America.

1 comment:

Ramesh said...

Hey - what's wrong with elitism. Good luck to the successful guys.

And I don't buy thearguement that somebody who usss a perfectly legal tax scheme that others can't afford to use is somehow doing something wrong.

See, I haven't lost my conservative views !!