Americans still want taxes raised on rich to adjust for inequality

There's a lesson in these 30-year polling results for every single one of the Texas House Democrats who voted to cut state taxes last week (in conjunction with their Republican brothers and sisters).

Despite the growing focus on inequality in recent years, the 63% of Americans who say that money and wealth should be more evenly distributed among a larger percentage of the people is almost the same as the 60% who said this in 1984.

Americans' agreement that money and wealth need to be more evenly distributed reached a high point of 68% in April 2008, in the last year of the George W. Bush administration, and just before the full effects of the Great Recession began to take hold. Americans became slightly less likely to agree with the idea later that year and in surveys conducted in 2009, 2011 and 2013. This year's increase to 63% is close to the average of 62% agreement across the 13 times Gallup has asked the question since 1984. The latest data are from Gallup's April 9-12 Economy and Personal Finance survey.

Worth emphasizing: the percentages deviated steadily during the Reagan and Bush the Elder years, narrowed sharply after Bush the Lesser's election selection in 2000, rose to its highest separation levels as the economy slid off a cliff at the close of W's Debacle in 2008.... and then cramped again, as it became apparent to Fox News consumers that Barack Obama was, indeed, a socialist.

Stop the wars, tax the rich.  That's an easy campaign slogan, but the Democrats don't use it because they know they can't follow through on those promises.

"Don't extrapolate a national poll to Texas", you may be thinking, especially since Republicans who quite clearly don't stand with the majority dominate the Lone Star electorate.

Yes, I'm sure that all this has nothing to do with historically low voter turnout in Texas, particularly among former Democratic voters.  You can blame a bit of that on the most restrictive photo ID legislation in the nation, of course.  But at some point Democrats have to take responsibility for their collective fate, and when they decline or refuse to do so when the votes get called in the legislature, or the Congress, then you get what we had here last week: failure to communicate.

Is anyone really surprised?

Update: Thanks to Gadfly for the link to Gallup. And more from Vox.

But in some ways the most interesting demographic sub-sample is the age one. Respondents ages 18 to 34 are supportive of redistributive taxation by a 59-38 margin, while those over 55 are much more skeptical — 47 percent say tax the rich, and 50 percent disagree. In other words, the age stratification of American politics isn't just about gay marriage or marijuana; it cuts to the core economic policy divides in Washington and state capitals around the country.

Now if they would only vote.

Matt Drudge and Martin O'Malley

(What?  You were expecting some Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, or Mike Huckabee?)

As Cillizza at the WaPo notes, Drudge made his bones on the Clintons twenty years ago.  The problem is that he continues to do so, and the lazy corporate media lets him keep doing it by sniffing his ass like he's a dog in heat.  You may need to click over to catch up on the backstory;  this news is now a week old, which means it was out there before the rumors broke about Bernie Sanders' announcement on Tuesday, and then Sanders' fairly dominant news cycle (from Thursday, the day he declared, to the coverage about his campaign cash haul, and all the way through to the Sunday talk shows).  Because of last week's many other breaking developments -- but particularly due to the Baltimore, Maryland connection -- Drudge's pimping of O'Malley hasn't registered in the plus column yet for the former Terrapin State governor.

As usual you should read it all, but here's the last three grafs.

And it's not just that Drudge is deciding what pieces of content from the biggest media outlets in the country are the ones that get attention/traffic. It's also that he remains extremely influential as a sort of daily booking guide for cable television.  Bookers from every network check Drudge religiously to see what stories he's chosen to feature. Often those stories wind up getting airtime.

So, if Drudge promotes Martin O'Malley, then O'Malley will almost certainly get more attention from the media, which should translate to a higher level of interest — or at least recognition — among average voters.

How long will O'Malley's Drudge honeymoon last? Probably up until (or, really, if) Drudge succeeds in helping to make O'Malley a semi-credible Clinton challenger. At which point, if history is any guide, Drudge will turn on him.

I think the honeymoon is already over, for reasons previously ascribed.  But if it isn't, and you start to see shirtless O'Malley pics on Good Morning America and the like, just know who's behind it.

A message to all Houston mayoral candidates

At the end of this piece from the inimitable Charles Pierce about Bernie Sanders, there's an excellent message for everyone running -- and considering a run -- for mayor of Houston.

To establish: the last Socialist to be elected mayor of a major American city was a fellow named Frank P. Zeidler, who served as mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1948 and was re-elected twice, holding that office until 1960.  He was actually the third of three Socialists elected Milwaukee mayor in the first half of the last century.  Zeidler won his first election in 1938, as Milwaukee County Surveyor, on the Progressive Party line, as a Bull Moose liberal.  Now here's the relevant part.

Once I heard (Zeidler) say that, when he was coming up, what made you a socialist was the fact that you believed your city should fix potholes and that it should have a fire department.

Is anybody calling Bill King a socialist because he wants to fix the potholes?  A few people are labeling Steve Costello that, derogatorily of course, because he supported a fee that would go to repairing the drainage infrastructure of the city.  A few more are calling Sylvester Turner a socialist because of his efforts to make sure our firefighters aren't impoverished in their retirement.  But those are all the same people who have been calling Barack Obama a "soshulist" for the last six years, who marked John Cornyn a RINO (and re-elected him anyway), and who believe that the US Army is preparing for an armed occupation of rural Texas.  So perhaps their judgment, not to mention their definition of 'socialist', is questionable.

But if or when a member of the Harris County Green Party or the Houston Socialist Workers Party or even the Houston Communist Party declares for mayor in 2015, try to keep in mind what actual leftists want to do, because it's the very same thing the Republicans and conservatives want: to fix the potholes and have a fire department.

Now the police, the roles they are supposed to serve in our community versus their original intent... maybe liberals and conservatives still have a difference of opinion on that.