New Jersey Democrat Josh Gottheimer boasted about saving the SALT tax deduction that benefits wealthy Americans and castigated Trump-voting states as “moocher states.”
SO WHAT
The GOP is increasingly becoming the only game in town for blue-collar Americans.
WHAT HAPPENED
In a tweet on Friday, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., cheered his own victory of securing tax cuts for the richest Americans, while dumping on red states that are less economically developed.
Gottheimer reiterated his comments to Politico.
- “I’ve been fighting for this since the first month I got into office,” Gottheimer, who was elected in 2016, was quoted as saying in Wednesday’s edition of Politico Playbook.
- “Right when [DONALD] TRUMP and the red states — I call them the moocher states — stuck it to us.”
- Leading Democrats seem to think the controversial tax policy is needed to secure passage of President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” initiative.
Per Politico: “Gottheimer is confident it will survive intact. He has courted Sen. JOE MANCHIN (D-W.Va.), who ‘knows how important this is to me,” Gottheimer said.”
THE OLD GOP
In 2012, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney endured backlash from his opponents and the media for making comments similar to Gottheimer’s.
“47 percent of Americans pay no income taxes…And so my job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” Romney said in a leaked video recording that helped upend his candidacy and arguably defined the stance of the GOP at the time.
THE NEW GOP
Gottheimer’s SALT advocacy comes as a new wave of Republicans increasingly try to rebrand GOP as “a multiethnic, working class party.”
And at least one influential leftist agrees with that the populist right has assumed the working class mantle, arguing that : Democrats, once a primarily labor-focused party, have instead put identity politics at the center of their political messaging.
- “Identity politics has so effectively carved up the left’s traditional constituencies into little grievance fiefdoms that there simply isn’t room for the solidarity that’s necessary,” leftist academic Freddie deBoer wrote in a recent Substack post.
SAME ENERGY
Meanwhile, Democrats’ penchant for attaching themselves to decadent, elitist spectacles have made it harder for them to restore their credentials as a party for the working man.
