Robin Burk is accredited to this year's Conservative Political Action Conference as a member of the Winds of Change.NET team. She's covering CPAC as a private citizen and maybe a "citizen journalist" (if she could figure out what that means), as an academic studying new media trends, and as an ordinary voter interested in national & international affairs. Robin is not affiliated with the
organizations who sponsor CPAC.
I'm sitting here next to LaShawn Barber at Blogger's Corner (more a corner than a Row). A little earlier I managed to snag a few minutes with Ian Walters, the young (hey, I'm 53 - lots of the people here are 'young' to me) Communications Director of the American Conservative Union and also for CPAC. Picking up on Chris Nolan's comment that CPAC is "uniformly white" I asked Ian about his experience as a Filipino-Brit in the conservative movement here.
WOC: Tell me a little about your experience in the conservative movement as a person who's "not uniformly white".
Ian: I'm to the right of most white Americans and many white conservatives on certain issues, such as immigration. I think this issue divides people more by generation - 1st generation immigrants, 2nd etc. - than by race. But let's get more specific rather than deal with sweeping broad statements about minorities.
WOC: What conservative policies do you see as most beneficial to non-whites?
Ian: Tax reform. Minorities benefit economically from allowing taxpayers to keep more of their paycheck and from compelling them to earn for themselves. The flipside of this is important too. Progressively tax rates on entrepreneurial earnings are an attack on success. They send minorities a message that it isn't worth desiring or striving to earn more.
Chris overstates the racial makeup here, and also the male dominance vibe. It is true, though, that the crowd here is predominantly white. It could be that the non-white conservatives are at the other conference across the street from CPAC.
Perhaps she's also confusing DC/left coast variations with right/left.
Tax "reform" that provides most of the benefits to the top 2% does NOT help the middle class. Why? Because that saddles us with huge deficits that must be paid back eventually. The non-Social Security federal deficit is about $600 billion -- that's more than $2000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. Now conservatives may say, "That's OK, the deficit will help 'starve the beast.'" This is a wrongheaded approach. If there are programs that should be cut, cut them. But, deficits are not 'starving the beast' because surprise there isn't so much fat on the beast as everyone believed. Surprise! It costs a lot of money to live in a civilized society. Taxes are the dues we pay to live in a civilized society. Cutting taxes on the rich is not the way to help poor and middle-class businesses thrive.