Bill Maher called out the Republican frauds who are pretending to care about the middle-class by hitting them on the head with the reality of where the middle-class came from.
Video:
http://youtu.be/ymrG_IeK4as
After quoting Sarah Palin, Jeb Bush, and Mitt Romney’s recent comments blaming Democrats for the plight of the middle-class, Maher said:
Yeah, those damn Democrats. Always fighting the Republican Party’s efforts to stick up for the little guy. There is no shame in the Republican game. This is the party that used to like to say a rising tide lifts all boats, which is easy to say when you’re on the yacht. So what’s happening is the Democrats are proposing to nibble around the edges of our middle-class problem, and the Republicans are pretending to care while they go back to servicing eight rich d***heads who own coal mines, and no one is telling the truth, which is that the large thriving middle-class that America used to have didn’t just appear out of the blue.
It was created using an economic tool called socialism.
Oh, I know when never use that word here in buzzword nation, but that is exactly what our government did after World War II. It taxed the rich up to ninety percent and massively redistributed that money through the GI Bill so that more than half the population benefitted from free college, free job training, cheap mortgages, and much much more. Yes, for a brief shining moment, we were Finland. Now we can debate whether that is a good thing or bad thing to go back to, but what is beyond debate is that is what happened. The Fifties and Sixties are the era of socialism in America.
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Here’s the reality. A middle-class is actually not the byproduct of capitalism. Ask any historian, a middle-class is actually a fluke in history.
It is obvious that Republicans have been told by their focus groups that saying the words middle-class will make them more popular with voters, but here’s the problem, Republican policies are what killed the middle-class. Republicans, more than ever before, are being driven by an ideology that is thirsting for pure capitalism. In a purely capitalistic system, there is no middle-class. There are buyers and sellers, haves and have nots. There is no room for a whole class of people in the middle.
Maher was correct. The middle-class was an intentional policy creation. Policy after WWII was designed to help those returning from war. It was a downward redistribution of wealth. In contrast, current Republican policies are designed to redistribute wealth upwards.
One of the byproducts of the Great Recession has been the decline in popularity of trickle-down economics. Conservative economic philosophy brought about an economic collapse. The American people still have a bitter taste in their mouths after the last conservative experiment. That lingering feeling looms over all political debate.
The current political climate in the United States is defined by the ideological struggle between liberalism and conservatism. Republicans won a heavily regionalized election in 2014, but it the left that has been gaining all the ground since 2012. The Republican mouthing of the term middle-class is nothing more than conservatives trying to give their trickle down emperor some new clothes.
The reality is that there is only one party that is willing to put the policies in place that are needed to create a new middle-class, and it isn’t the Republicans.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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