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Tallying the wedge issues is terrible methodology that focuses on battles and misses the war. Would you rather win at 100 wedge issues or would you rather win a

Tallying the wedge issues is terrible methodology that focuses on battles and misses the war. Would you rather win at 100 wedge issues or would you rather win at 0 wedge issues but the policies you wanted were already in place and not under attack? To avoid this mistake, focus on the status quo of policies that facilitate comparison. Taxes are an excellent candidate. Everyone would rather have someone else pay the taxes. True power will arrange for it to be so. Look for tax privilege (types of income, industries, etc) and you will find true power.

jrexilius 5y ago
By that logic the poor in the US have the most power? As they pay generally close to zero direct taxes (indirectly they pay the corporate taxes and gas taxes and such as hidden costs in their daily consumption)...
- techbio 5y ago
  Perhaps? If not individually then collectively, whether as motivation toward a cheaper food supply, or as a caution to those who are not poor but only a couple of defiant decisions from losing what they've gained. It seems counterintuitive, but GPs rule of thumb may hold even there. I think the problem is in comparing a few wealthy individuals or cabals (in control) to an enormous number of real people (each without much control at all). Poverty is negative power under the same hierarchy responsible for controlling positive power.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  We are looking for policy concessions. Not taking money from someone who doesn't have money to take isn't much of a policy concession. Also, as you point out, there are tons of indirect taxes on the poor, but other aspects of the policy status quo really drive it home -- poor social safety net, bad public transport, "public" schools funded with property tax, policies that make rent go up, shipping the jobs overseas, etc, etc. We even allow homeless spikes! My general point isn't so much that taxes are an ideal metric, it's that we should focus on measuring the status quo rather than measuring who won yesterday's wedge issue battles.
  - jejones3141 5y ago
    How is not giving something to someone equivalent to taking something from someone?
    - techbio 5y ago
      They are not equivalent at all, they are almost exactly opposite. Each would reverse the other.
    - jjoonathan 5y ago
      How is this distinction relevant to whether or not tallying wedge issues is sound methodology for identifying elites?
- pydry 5y ago
  >By that logic the poor in the US have the most power? No: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/income-tax-rate-wealthy.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/incom... >indirectly they pay the corporate taxes Corporation tax incidence falls squarely on shareholders. Profit taxes affect those who are the beneficiary of profits, and the vast majority of the stock market is owned by the very, very wealthy. It's not unusual for people to be spoon-fed the exact opposite impression, of course.
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    Costs of doing business get baked-in to the sale price.
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      Corporation tax isn’t a cost of doing business, it’s calculated after costs have been removed from revenue.
      - techbio 5y ago
        That seems to be a distinction without a difference, as they all are removed from net profits.
        imtringued 5y ago
        No, there is a huge difference. Your company passes on VAT, sales tax, the income tax needed to hire workers and other taxes. The profits of the company are only relevant to investors, not consumers.
      - jrexilius 5y ago
        Because businesses forget every year what taxes are and don't factor them into the needed margins for a product?
        5y ago
- neltnerb 5y ago
  Sales tax is highly regressive (in the technical sense) and makes up a larger fraction of the income of a poor person.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  The poor would be paying more taxes if their income had tracked productivity gains and GDP growth. Instead it substantially went to the 0.5%.
SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
It's not that easy, because not all groups are affected equally by all policies. With taxes, for instance, the analysis would suggest that nonprofits are the most powerful group in the country - businesses can occasionally bring their income tax down to $0 with tricky accounting, but nonprofits are exempt as a matter of right! I don't think that's a reasonable conclusion, and I'm pretty sure it's not the one you had in mind.
- techbio 5y ago
  Let's disentangle the players in this in the following way. Because it would be absurd to believe charities are the most powerful entities, and "tricky accounting" etc reduces tax liabilities to the actual powerful, is there a way to discharge the conflict? Yes, there is. The charities are created by and funded by the actually powerful. I read somewhere that Sierra Club (and Greenpeace?) received millions more from the energy industry than in personal checks from concerned citizens, and among other things, one might consider tax policy a firmer decision making footing than organizational altruism.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Of course it's not that easy -- just because taxes are relatively easy to compare does not mean that they are easy to compare. Good comparisons are always difficult. Re: nonprofits, I don't think those are the best counterexample to the "look at taxes" strategy because they are absolutely notorious for playing a part in the tax avoidance schemes of the wealthy. That doesn't mean there aren't nonprofits that write open source software, shelter animals, feed starving kids in impoverished reasons... but there are also nonprofits that serve primarily as a mechanism for getting money from point A to point B with the lowest taxes. The two are difficult to tease apart, and unfortunately that is the entire point.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ramblenode 5y ago
> Tallying the wedge issues is terrible methodology I'm unclear why you think these are wedge issues. I've copied what I think is the relevant paragraph describing the sample: These 1,779 cases do not constitute a sample from the universe of all possible political alternatives (this is hardly conceivable), but we see them as particularly relevant to assessing the public’s influence on policy. The included policies are not restricted to the narrow Washington “policy agenda." At the same time—since they were seen as worth asking poll questions about—they tend to concern matters of relatively high salience, about which it is plausible that average citizens may have real opinions and may exert some political influence. The authors describe the issues as "high salience" because they were deemed worthy of being in opinion polls, and presumably because they were part of the national discourse. To the extent these are wedge issues, what poll question isn't a wedge issue? Polls concern possible changes to society, and that will always have opposing sides.
- fwip 5y ago
  > Polls concern possible changes to society The concept of the Overton Window is instructive here. Policies like "should local property taxes go up by .5 percentage points to fund school safety" are safely within the range of allowable discussions. These are issues on which the "elites" disagree, or don't have particular attachment to. But questions that threaten their status, like "Is it good that individuals own the means of production?" are not going to be in the Overton Window any time soon, mainly because those elites agree that they like the status quo.
  - thrav 5y ago
    I wouldn't go so far as to say that's the main reason. The main reason is that doing it that way has proven to yield good results. We have work to do on how we manage the negative externalities of the approach, but the approach itself has proven solid.
    - fwip 5y ago
      "Good results" is a subjective measure. The guys winning capitalism are a lot more likely to think the results are good than the people they're standing on.

jrexilius 5y ago

By that logic the poor in the US have the most power? As they pay generally close to zero direct taxes (indirectly they pay the corporate taxes and gas taxes and such as hidden costs in their daily consumption)...

techbio 5y ago
Perhaps? If not individually then collectively, whether as motivation toward a cheaper food supply, or as a caution to those who are not poor but only a couple of defiant decisions from losing what they've gained. It seems counterintuitive, but GPs rule of thumb may hold even there. I think the problem is in comparing a few wealthy individuals or cabals (in control) to an enormous number of real people (each without much control at all). Poverty is negative power under the same hierarchy responsible for controlling positive power.
jjoonathan 5y ago
We are looking for policy concessions. Not taking money from someone who doesn't have money to take isn't much of a policy concession. Also, as you point out, there are tons of indirect taxes on the poor, but other aspects of the policy status quo really drive it home -- poor social safety net, bad public transport, "public" schools funded with property tax, policies that make rent go up, shipping the jobs overseas, etc, etc. We even allow homeless spikes! My general point isn't so much that taxes are an ideal metric, it's that we should focus on measuring the status quo rather than measuring who won yesterday's wedge issue battles.
- jejones3141 5y ago
  How is not giving something to someone equivalent to taking something from someone?
  - techbio 5y ago
    They are not equivalent at all, they are almost exactly opposite. Each would reverse the other.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    How is this distinction relevant to whether or not tallying wedge issues is sound methodology for identifying elites?
pydry 5y ago
>By that logic the poor in the US have the most power? No: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/income-tax-rate-wealthy.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/incom... >indirectly they pay the corporate taxes Corporation tax incidence falls squarely on shareholders. Profit taxes affect those who are the beneficiary of profits, and the vast majority of the stock market is owned by the very, very wealthy. It's not unusual for people to be spoon-fed the exact opposite impression, of course.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  Costs of doing business get baked-in to the sale price.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    Corporation tax isn’t a cost of doing business, it’s calculated after costs have been removed from revenue.
    - techbio 5y ago
      That seems to be a distinction without a difference, as they all are removed from net profits.
      - imtringued 5y ago
        No, there is a huge difference. Your company passes on VAT, sales tax, the income tax needed to hire workers and other taxes. The profits of the company are only relevant to investors, not consumers.
    - jrexilius 5y ago
      Because businesses forget every year what taxes are and don't factor them into the needed margins for a product?
      - 5y ago
neltnerb 5y ago
Sales tax is highly regressive (in the technical sense) and makes up a larger fraction of the income of a poor person.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
The poor would be paying more taxes if their income had tracked productivity gains and GDP growth. Instead it substantially went to the 0.5%.

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago

It's not that easy, because not all groups are affected equally by all policies. With taxes, for instance, the analysis would suggest that nonprofits are the most powerful group in the country - businesses can occasionally bring their income tax down to $0 with tricky accounting, but nonprofits are exempt as a matter of right! I don't think that's a reasonable conclusion, and I'm pretty sure it's not the one you had in mind.

techbio 5y ago
Let's disentangle the players in this in the following way. Because it would be absurd to believe charities are the most powerful entities, and "tricky accounting" etc reduces tax liabilities to the actual powerful, is there a way to discharge the conflict? Yes, there is. The charities are created by and funded by the actually powerful. I read somewhere that Sierra Club (and Greenpeace?) received millions more from the energy industry than in personal checks from concerned citizens, and among other things, one might consider tax policy a firmer decision making footing than organizational altruism.
jjoonathan 5y ago
Of course it's not that easy -- just because taxes are relatively easy to compare does not mean that they are easy to compare. Good comparisons are always difficult. Re: nonprofits, I don't think those are the best counterexample to the "look at taxes" strategy because they are absolutely notorious for playing a part in the tax avoidance schemes of the wealthy. That doesn't mean there aren't nonprofits that write open source software, shelter animals, feed starving kids in impoverished reasons... but there are also nonprofits that serve primarily as a mechanism for getting money from point A to point B with the lowest taxes. The two are difficult to tease apart, and unfortunately that is the entire point.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ramblenode 5y ago

> Tallying the wedge issues is terrible methodology I'm unclear why you think these are wedge issues. I've copied what I think is the relevant paragraph describing the sample: These 1,779 cases do not constitute a sample from the universe of all possible political alternatives (this is hardly conceivable), but we see them as particularly relevant to assessing the public’s influence on policy. The included policies are not restricted to the narrow Washington “policy agenda." At the same time—since they were seen as worth asking poll questions about—they tend to concern matters of relatively high salience, about which it is plausible that average citizens may have real opinions and may exert some political influence. The authors describe the issues as "high salience" because they were deemed worthy of being in opinion polls, and presumably because they were part of the national discourse. To the extent these are wedge issues, what poll question isn't a wedge issue? Polls concern possible changes to society, and that will always have opposing sides.

fwip 5y ago
> Polls concern possible changes to society The concept of the Overton Window is instructive here. Policies like "should local property taxes go up by .5 percentage points to fund school safety" are safely within the range of allowable discussions. These are issues on which the "elites" disagree, or don't have particular attachment to. But questions that threaten their status, like "Is it good that individuals own the means of production?" are not going to be in the Overton Window any time soon, mainly because those elites agree that they like the status quo.
- thrav 5y ago
  I wouldn't go so far as to say that's the main reason. The main reason is that doing it that way has proven to yield good results. We have work to do on how we manage the negative externalities of the approach, but the approach itself has proven solid.
  - fwip 5y ago
    "Good results" is a subjective measure. The guys winning capitalism are a lot more likely to think the results are good than the people they're standing on.