Executive Summary

My previous post, Might Members of the Professional Class Embrace Democratic Socialism?, reads more like a full White Paper than a blog post.  I did a word count on it and it's about 5,400 words.  Plus it is written as an overview, with many links to other posts for further detail.  So, it is a slug to get through.  Below I offer what might be considered an Executive Summary of the ideas, which should be far more readable.

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The Democrats appear stuck in identifying a unifying theme that appeals to voters. Sometimes when stuck, the best way to get unstuck is to reframe the issues. This proposal can be considered such a reframing. 

The focus is on what I call the professional class, households within the 80th-99th percentile in the income distribution. For 2024, the last year when the data is available, the 80th percentile begins at around $175,000 while median household income was around $83,730. So, households in the professional class have more than twice the income of the median household. 

Next is the surprising part. The focus is not on what these households will receive but rather on what they will contribute beyond what they are already contributing. These households will contribute by agreeing to pay more income tax. 

Nowadays, most of these households support the Democrats. By making this agreement these households will encourage the Democrats to embrace a platform which features higher income taxes on both the professional class and the rich (the 1%). Where in the past proposals to tax the rich have largely ignored the professional class, either those proposals have been unsuccessful or perhaps have worked for a while but then came undone. By making the professional class a feature of the platform, the proposal will be far more likely to succeed and far more able to stick. 

With the agreement in place, the Democrats can then focus on programs that economically benefit the lower 80% of households. Thus, the idea is to make the Democrats focus on the economic welfare of ordinary Americans, while giving them a credible way to fund the programs that they’d like to put forward. 

Members of the professional class are tired of the rampant selfishness that pervades society. They very much would like to contain that selfishness and offer a more publicly spirited alternative, social responsibility. Embracing the agreement is an act of social responsibility. Sticking with the agreement is again the socially responsible thing to do. 

However, members of the professional class recognize that acting individually they are powerless to achieve a change in the ethos. What is required, instead, is for members of the professional class to act in concert, with this unitary action highly visible to all members of society. Were that to happen it would encourage other members of the professional class to embrace the idea, and it would also encourage members of households in the lower 80% of the income distribution who are of voting age to vote for Democrats. 

There remains to consider how members of the professional class can make their embrace of the agreement in both a credible and highly visible manner. To do this, imagine there is a demonstration project that benefits foodbanks, homeless shelters, school organizations, and other charities at various locations around the country. The project would be funded by donations from members of the professional class, who would contribute the difference between what they would have paid in income tax were the tax rates as in 1995, inflation adjusted, versus what they actually paid in the past year. These donations would signal a willingness to be taxed at the higher rates. 

 

For this to work, word of the demonstration project must spread widely and the demonstration project must grow precipitously. Were that to happen, the overall goal would be obtainable.