Attacking Republicans as greedy billionaires will never lose its appeal or utility to Democrats, but these days, it’s more popular to attack Republicans for being poor.
Obama administration alumnus and MSNBC economic analyst Steven Rattner recently broadcast to his followers and viewers his analysis that Republicans are poor.
“Blue states pay. Red states get,” Rattner’s slide on Morning Joe said on Sept. 5.
“While red states spend more federal dollars than they contribute, blue states get the short end of the stick,” Rattner posted on X that same morning.
On TV, Rattner said, “Residents of blue states earn a lot more than residents of red states, so they pay a lot more in taxes. … Government has tilted in favor of red states — the same government Trump would like to reduce or dismantle.”
This is now a favorite data point for Democrats. Some try to argue that it represents hypocrisy — Republicans say they oppose redistribution, but they benefit from it!
It’s an odd moral compass on display there: It’s bad to oppose things that benefit you.
A couple of days later, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) held a press conference to attack Kentuckians for being poor and Floridians for being old.
“In 2017, red state moochers jammed through the ‘tax hike bill,’ which capped the [state and local tax] deduction at $10,000,” Gottheimer complained in a speech in which he used the word “moocher” 11 times to argue for tax cuts for the rich.
When Gottheimer and Rattner blast Republican-run states as “moocher states,” they are referring to the “balance of payments.” This is a simple subtraction equation. On one side of the subtraction sign are all the federal payments to individuals, local governments, and companies in a state — this is mostly Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. On the other side are all the federal taxes paid by the residents of the state.
States with lots of rich people, such as Gottheimer’s New Jersey, pay a lot in taxes. States with lots of poor people or retirees receive lots of federal payments. (So do states with many federal contractors, such as Maryland and Virginia.)
The “moocher” attack, then, is “you’re all too old and poor.”
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Some Democrats like to get more granular. “Seventy-one percent of the GDP in America is in blue counties,” Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) likes to say.
Underlying this all is an odd sort of materialistic Calvinism: Democrats’ wealth is an outward sign of their inward virtue. But none of this will stop Democrats from attacking Republicans as the party of the rich.