THE ERA OF THE MONEYED UNDERCLASS?

What happened to the rich and powerful’s power? While the federal government debates Barack Obama’s proposals to milk the well-to-do, New York is poised to approve a substantial personal-income-tax hike for people making more than $500,000. New York’s business elites are now wondering how they lost out. . . . Dan Cantor, who runs the labor-affiliated Working Families Party, gave his own diagnosis. “We just work much harder than the right-wingers. They think they can just do it by writing checks to the politicians. We don’t have money. We have our passion.”

That’s not quite true. In Albany, the wealthiest and most well-connected groups often are representing the little guy. The teachers unions burn through $4 million a year on donations to state lawmakers and lobbying expenses, rivaling the outlays of the state’s hospital associations, which also pressed for a tax hike. Since December, the supporters of the rich tax—an alliance of organized labor and community-activist groups—waged a campaign that further weakened Governor Paterson. They spent millions on ads attacking him and staged feisty protests. (At one near City Hall last month, 1199 SEIU president George Gresham mocked his adversaries: “Where are the wealthy going to go? Iowa?”) . . .The idea of a moneyed underclass isn’t a new one. Tocqueville, a contemporary of President Jackson’s, saw wealth as a “cause of disfavor and an obstacle to gaining power” in America. The rich, he wrote, “never form a body which has manners and regulations of its own,” and prefer to retreat into private life than to “engage in an often unequal struggle against the poorest of their fellow citizens.”

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