Saturday, April 04, 2009

Statistics Convergence

Liberals in the modern political sense constitute about 19% of the adult citizenry in America. This a core constituency of the Democratic Party, but not its only group, and not always reliably Democrat, as votes for Green Party candidates are drawn almost entirely from this group. Several Democratic subgroups have fewer children than average, but this is the sector which most dramatically pulls that party's average down.

This is also the sector of the population which most strongly supports the transformative, and very expensive, aspects of the bailout bill, the stimulus package, and the federal budget increases. One of the warnings about these jaw-dropping amounts of funds that conservatives, and especially libertarians, keep bringing up is the amount of debt we are foisting off onto future generations - usually phrased as "our children and grandchildren."

So why would progressives care about them, exactly?

It's a rather ugly thought, I admit. But there it is.

5 comments:

karrde said...

It is a curious little fact.

I've been told the old saw that if a man isn't liberal at 20, he is soft-hearted; the corollary is that if he is still liberal at 40, he is soft-headed.

I've also been told that single women tend to be liberal, while single mothers tend to be conservative.

I'm not aware of how well-founded each statement is. However, they do seem to match the general trends that I am aware of.

@nooil4pacifists said...

Or maybe, as Melissa Clouthier says, "Democratic debt is morally superior to Republican debt."

Anonymous said...

Or as Margaret Thatcher said ...

"The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."

Micha Elyi said...

A 'progressive' is someone who intends to someday draw Social Security checks paid for by taxes on other people's kids.

As for what karrde's been told, it's mistaken. Females of the unwed persuasion, whether or not they're mothers, tend to be stiffly left-liberal. It's not motherhood that distinguishes conservative leaning women from the rest, it's marriage.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

My reading of the stats is more similar to ME's. Marriage makes both sexes more conservative (or perhaps more conservative people are more likely to marry), and those with children are more conservative still (again, chicken/egg). This is more true of women than men. It is a favorite saying of mine that if the voted were limited to those who had raised two children past the age of eight, the Democratic Party would cease to be viable - especially its progressive wing.