Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Exactly For Whom Is Alberta Darling Representing?

Last Friday, Alberta Darling, in another show of desperation, went on air with Mark Bellowing of WISN and said that she is still spry enough to put her foot in her mouth:
I just went to a woman today and she said, “Why are you giving tax breaks to the wealthy?” I said, “What do you consider wealthy?” She said, “$250,000 and above.”

And I said “that is small business.” Those are small business people. Those aren’t wealthy people. We are not interested in raising taxes on the quote “rich.”
Wow! A quarter of a million dollars is chump change in Darling's eyes.

As my good friend, Jay Bullock points out, teachers don't exactly qualify as being rich by and stretch of the imagination. I can testify that the same holds true for social workers and most other represented Milwaukee County workers. Actually, it probably holds true for most public service workers, with the obvious exceptions of mistresses of state senators or sons of wealth donors.

Yet it's the teachers, social workers, park workers, janitors, plow truck drivers, etc. that the Republicans have attacked as being the "haves," living high on the hog at the expense of the "have nots." But if a quarter million is chump change, how can someone making less than 20% of that be the problem?

Another good friend, Jake, takes a different angle, figuring Darling is doing what any good senator would do and representing her constituents. To test this hypothesis, Jake took a look at the median incomes of the communities she represents. What he found fell short of the quarter million mark:

Median household income (2009 dollars)
Whitefish Bay $106,500
Mequon $101,385
Fox Point $100,000
Bayside $81,164
Germantown $71,647
Menomonee Falls $67,506
Glendale $63,770
Brown Deer $61,097
Shorewood $60,272
Thiensville $54,449

Mmm, while some of those incomes are up there, and most are quite a bit higher than your average public sector worker, they are no where near what Darling would call wealthy.

Well, Darling, reeking of flopsweat, scrambled to clarify her position (read damage control) said that a family with a quarter million is wealthy, a small business with that money isn't.

Ah! So she's repping the small business people in her district. Right? Wrong.

Jake also notes her slippery defensive gamble and calls BS on it and on her.

I would just add to Jake's observations that another strong point showing that she has as much disdain for the small business in her district as she does the tax payers and the unemployed or the needy.  For if she truly cared about these small business owners, she would never have agreed to cut the transit funding so deeply that customers and workers will no longer be able to make it to most of the businesses in Northeastern Milwaukee County.  This obviously will severely hurt these businesses, since they won't have workers to turn out the product or provide the service, and they wouldn't have the customers to purchase them even if they did.

So we've figured out that Alberta Darling is NOT representing public service workers, the families in her district or small business owners. So who is she representing? The Koch Brothers? Maybe. But she's not for the people of Wisconsin, that's for sure.

Whoever it is, all we know is that Alberta Darling is not standing up for the little guy or the working class, at all.

3 comments:

  1. Perhaps I am the guy that says "there must be a pony in here somewhere," but maybe she really BELIEVES that trickle-down horse shit. Then we can only accuse her of being stupid, rather than malicious. Awe, hell, it was worth a shot.

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  2. Democrats = Enemy Combatants

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  3. Anonymous-

    Is that why the Teahadists were traveling the state with guns and using inflammatory language?

    Then again, I'm sure the British called the Revolutionaries "enemy combatants" too.

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