Bernie Sanders buys a $575,000 vacation home and the Internet cries hypocrisy

[richeiieu]

Bernie Sanders does not like fancy-schmancy things. He isn’t a huge fan of gazillionaires, tuxedos or any of the highfalutin trappings of society’s economic ills. This, of course, made him a hero among the country’s growing socialist movement. So when news came that the former presidential candidate bought a $575,000 vacation home for his family,

Comments

[amw]

I am sorry but having a half mill left over for a cottage is NOT the norm, inheritance or not. Pretending like it ain't no thing for a family to drop that kind of money on a house they are not even going to live in most of the year is so out of touch I can't even.

I know these upper middle class apologists first hand because they are my people. When I lived in Canada I had a 6 figure salary and several colleagues who owned cottages. They talked about how they were so hard done by because their taxes were so high and it was a struggle to make their mortgage payments on their 750k Beaches house and wah wah wah I can't afford childcare downtown. "Oh, but the 1%ers..." Cry me a freakin river. There is no question that the income gap is insane and the top 1% really do hold a massively disproportionate amount of the wealth, but the top 10% don't have a whole lot of room to complain. They live far, far easier lives than the majority of the REAL middle class, not to mention the working class. For many people the idea of owning a house at all is a dream, much less a second fucking house that you don't even live in. Talk about over-consumption/consumerism, a holiday house has got to be up there with a freakin yacht or a private jet. It's just so unnecessary.

Now, of course, I don't fault the Sanders family for wanting a cottage. Bernie never ran on an anti-consumerist platform. But as someone who tries to minimize my own consumption, and someone who has a lot of friends who will never be able to own a house, and many who can't even afford to rent more than a room in a shared apartment, it always irks me a bit to see my so-called left-wing peers being apologists for frivolous (if not conspicuous) consumption.

[amw]

Oh I'm not surprised either - I mean, his salary is public and his family is clearly in the income bracket where many of their peers would own a holiday home. I was more reacting to some of the commenters here who seem to think owning a holiday home, period, is a "normal" thing and not a luxury that only the upper middle class are privileged enough to enjoy. Personally, I think families who can afford that kind of luxury are probably not being taxed enough to start with, given how many Americans live in real poverty.

[redstar826]

I did mention it being somewhat normal for the middle class in my area. In Michigan, I know people who are middle class who have a summer cottage "up north", often because it has been in the family for several generations and is often shared by multiple family members. obviously, lots of families dont (mine included) but people dont really think you are rich if you do. But, I think is likely unique to this area.

and, that is actually an illustration of what good, union manufacturing jobs used to buy. The fact that auto workers and the like could save up and buy a small summer cottage is not a bad thing.

[amw]

Your description of Michigan sounds similar to Ontario. It does seem to be a bit of a Great Lakes thing, perhaps because cottages are more easily accessible from the big cities. Or perhaps because the weather is so miserable people value having a summer escape more than people on the West Coast or in the South. Still, i think middle class folks not considering themselves "rich" just because they have a cottage are a little out of touch with what it really means to be "poor".

I sort of agree with your last statement and sort of don't. While i do agree that working class folks should be able to afford the same kinds of things middle class folks can, i am not entirely sure that a union manufacturing job is working class. It may be working class insofar that it's hard labor, but it's not working class in the sense of income bracket. I had a good friend who was a unionized construction worker and she earned a fat paycheck rivaling my software developer's paycheck. Of course her job was much more physically demanding, but she got paid well for her time. Meanwhile a huge percentage of the workforce is in the service industry and those are the ones who are struggling to make enough to even afford one house, let alone two. Union manufacturing jobs are already well-paid and have been for years; imo we should be focusing on lifting up the unemployed, students and pink collar workers, not trying to recreate the long-gone glory years of hard-polluting heavy industry in the Rust Belt.

On a side note, i am planning a Greyhound trip from Windsor over to SF and want to stop a day in each state along the way. Is there any anywhere in Michigan you'd particularly recommend? I was considering somewhere between Detroit and Muskegon because i want to catch the ferry to Milwaukee.

[redstar826]

Honestly, I would stay in Muskegon or somewhere near there. The Lake Michigan beaches are great!

[amw]

Man you and me both. I have had the lowest lows in my life, living with my wife in a single-room flooded basement both jobless and earning six figures living alone in a downtown condo ordering in whenever the hell i felt like. Now i am somewhere in between, but every time one of my friends posts about how they can't afford decent food this week and i realize i don't even think about the price of food (or anything, really - my lifestyle costs are a fraction of my income) i wanna cry. I try to manually tax myself by sending cash to my less well-off friends or directly to people i know who are volunteering, but it's tough to give all my excess cash because i want to have a safety net in case i am some day jobless again.

I actually find the whole appeal to the middle class thing in American politics (especially, though it comes out in Canadian politics too) a bit frustrating. I think politicians should be fighting for the poverty-stricken and the working class first. We can worry about the middle class when the people who are really struggling are out of the hole. But i guess a lot of people wouldn't vote themselves higher taxes, even if it helped the bottom end of the curve. And Bernie (and others) are right to also complain about the 1% who have so much damn money that lifting thousands out of poverty would be nothing to them. So, take what we can get eh :-/

[redstar826]

to be honest, even after years of political organizing, it isn't always clear to me where the line is between "middle" and "working" class. Especially now that even many jobs which require degrees don't pay a living wage. I feel like the lines have been blurred a lot since the great recession. Lots of 'middle class' people in my community lost their jobs and then their homes. I would say they were struggling too.

[amw]

Good point, both of these replies. I guess if you call "middle class" the center of the bell curve around the median wage, then America's actual middle class is definitely not the white picket fence ideal. But if you call the "middle class" the people who can afford a family home and two cars and vacation every year, then that group is already on the upper end of the bell curve. And, i guess, it's those people who can afford all of those things and then call themselves "the struggling middle class" that kind of annoy me. But maybe that's because i work with too many insufferable douches.

[redstar826]

"Middle class" in the US is annoyingly vague. We have folks in a wide range of incomes who consider themselves middle class

[rex_dart]

It's because of the increasing polarization of wealth. idk what to call myself because I'm extremely comfortable and don't have to worry about anything and I can afford a lot of luxuries, but I'm driving a Prius instead of a Tesla, I shop at the Rack instead of Saks, etc. I would feel like an imposter at a benefit dinner. Maybe I could afford to keep a boat (in Chicago, where it is a wealth thing) or have a bunch of Louboutins if I didn't travel so much, so perhaps it's just an issue of priorities. But it's definitely confusing in an age of such particular types of conspicuous consumption that serve as markers of being upper class. And the fact that I don't have wealth and that often seems to be a prerequisite?

tl;dr I think our concept of upper class is fucked because of the ultra-wealthy.

[rex_dart]

Exactly. I see people yell about it if someone who makes more than 250k or so is called upper middle class, and on the one hand I agree that it's a different lifestyle and comfort level from someone fairly solidly middle class who makes 50-75k. On the other hand, we have a WHOLE class of prominent wealthy people who have lifestyles people making 250k - even in the long term - can never even dream of. tbh if I called myself upper class it would almost feel like letting the 1% in wealth off the hook. We aren't accumulating wealth (everything we earn is either spent, going back into stimulating the economy, or put away for retirement in very reasonable amounts), much less sitting on millions of dollars' worth of it in tax havens where it does fuck all for anyone else. There's so much going on with the UPPER upper class that has the ability to actually hoard money that's just fucked up and damaging on a huge scale, and that's a big part of the reason I really don't know what to call myself. It's also why I don't think it's quite fair to say that Bernie's a hypocrite for having several properties when the people he's been railing against all this time are WAY beyond anything he'll ever have.