As all of you know, I am not a "class warrior". I climbed the economic ladder to the smack-dab middle of the middle class until I was blasted off of it and into officially-defined poverty over two years ago. Yes, I'd like to avenge myself upon the SOB that did that to me (by having the same thing done to him, which is impossible, but it's always nice to have a fantasy to serve as a pleasant distraction), but not because he made twice what I did even when I was at my former career's pinnacle and he was manifestly unworthy of it.
I've simply never cared about how much other people earned. I've never considered it to be my business because....well, it isn't. That sort of thing can inspire one to try to attain the same great things for yourself and your family, but far more often it breeds resentment and a desire to tear down and rob them of what they've earned instead. Envy, in other words, levels; it does not lift up.
That is why the constant, endless, incessant rhetoric about the "middle class" every election cycle drives me absolutely nuts. Everything has to be done for the "middle class," the implication being that the "wealthy" are either irrelevant or screwed, even though it's in reality very difficult to actually screw the "wealthy" and without them there would be no jobs for the middle class. The idea should be to free up EVERYBODY, every income level, every economic strata, every "class" to go as far as talent, skills, knowledge, and opportunity can take them. Let the poor becoming working class, working class become middle class, middle class become rich, rich become the 1%. Hell, let EVERYBODY become the 1%. Yeah, I know, I should sign up for a remedial mathematics course, but you get the point I'm trying to make. Pandering entirely to one economic strata does nothing to benefit the overall economy, and THAT is what is desperately needed if the Great Obama Depression is ever to be brought to an end.
Stop obsessing over how the pie is divied up, and focus on growing the pie instead.
You want to improve your family's quality of life? You're gonna have to let your wealthier neighbor do the same. You'd think people would be able to live with that.
I was perusing a Newsmax Finance article earlier this morning on how much fruit the Obama "war on the middle class" is bearing - the first time since that economic measurement began decades ago that the middle class is not the majority of the American population. Which is what happens when economic opportunities are taken away from middle classers by "soak the rich" classism that simply motivates the "1%" to pull their financial resources out of productive endeavors and enterprises and into non-productive "shelters". The effect for the middle class? Lost jobs, lower wages, and sagging into lower economic strata. Such an outcome is always the case in communist, and communizing, countries; in its end form, there is the top ten percent or so (the ruling Party elite) and the other ninety percent are impoverished slaves.
But impoverished slaves that, in the earlier stages of that process, don't realize what they are or that that is their intended fate, because they've been brainwashed into believing that the "rich" and not the government has done it to them.
Which brings us to a quote from the aforementioned Newsmax Finance piece close to the very end of it:
To be sure, being a member of the middle-class has long been treated as an American badge of honor.
“For decades, the middle class had been the core of the country. A healthy middle class kept America strong,” experts and politicians told CNN Wire. “But more recently, these residents have struggled under stagnating wages and soaring costs. Presidential candidates on both sides of the political aisle are campaigning on ways to bolster the nation’s middle class and increase opportunities to climb the economic ladder,” CNN Wire reported.
Most Americans have traditionally identified themselves as middle class, even those at the top and bottom, reflecting a kind of cultural heritage tied to the American dream of self-reliance, The Sacramento Bee explained. “But the Great [Obama Depression has] shaken that image.”
A recent Gallup poll showed that just 51% of U.S. adults considered themselves middle or upper middle class, with 48% saying they are part of the lower or working class.
Patrick Egan, a politics professor at New York University, says the Pew findings and the Gallup surveys suggest that the public may be more open to policies of redistribution. [emphasis added]
i.e. State-sanctioned theft.
"Americans are always kind of reluctant to embrace open-class warfare," Egan said. But "if more Americans are under the idea of placing themselves at the bottom, you'll see politicians follow," he told Tribune. [emphasis added]
The Democrats, of course, have always been there. What Egan is saying is that Republican politicians will follow. Political battles will no longer be about economic growth, but about which economic strata gets more of an ever-shrinking "pie".
And while one would think that Tea Partiers would never stand for such a thing - "RINOs!!!!!!" - let us remember after whom they flocked mindlessly over the summer....
....and the protectionist, big-government, wealth-confiscation policies he touts. And last I checked, this man was at or near the top of the Republican primary polls.
You could even say that Barack Obama didn't have to force Donald Trump on the GOP, but that the GOP willingly became Trumplicans.
Which is to say, gave up, wittingly or unwittingly, the American dream and helped kill it stone cold dead.
Now THAT's a presidential legacy.
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