Replies to post #446348 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[arizona1]

Democrats now represent 9 of the 10 wealthiest congressional districts in the US

Because they put in policies that work for everyone. You just want everyone to be dirt poor like you in uneducated, unhealthy, drug addicted, West Virginia.

[newmedman]

don't think that's the flex you were looking for there, hotair.

Did you learn that at church today?

Did it ever dawn on you that the democratic run cities have vaulted the otherwise impoverished and middle class people into higher incomes?

No you didn't because you choose to live in your meager existence and complain about every one else, day in and day out. Keep voting for those Republicans and you'll always have something to complain about.

Oh, and the fact check you posted this morning only shows you to be more stupid than you let on. You should get back to outlying random polling numbers and run with that.

[blackhawks]

'Elitism and wealth'. We all know the pejorative meaning for elitism; air of superiority, condescension.
I think it's unfair to ascribe those negatives to people of achievement.

When did it stop being admirable to try to excel, get into the best school, work hard at your profession?

And what are the people who throw the word around doing BUT being condescending?

One way the disparity in wealth could be addressed is through a more progressive tax system; economic equality was higher when the marginal tax rates on individuals and corps. were higher too.

The GOP has done jack to address the problems you lay off on the Dems. Been that way for decades.

The Dems are still the party of the middle class as the elections of '20 and '22 demonstrated. There are NO polls that show voters believe that the GOP cares more about the middle an lower classes than do the Dems.

[fuagf]

Even the Republican ‘skinny’ relief bill failed. How is such unnecessary suffering justified?

"Democrats now represent 9 of the 10 wealthiest congressional districts in the US"

Related: March 9, 2021
Broad Public Support for Coronavirus Aid Package; Just a Third Say It Spends Too Much
More Americans say the Biden administration made a ‘good faith’ effort working with opposition than say the same of GOP leaders
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/03/09/broad-public-support-for-coronavirus-aid-package-just-a-third-say-it-spends-too-much/

Conservatives failed the American working class. Democrats got a bill through.

Margaret Somers

Republicans shouldn’t be immune from being called out for their inconsistency. Let’s not forget they once said cutting taxes on the wealthy would incentivize them to work harder

Mon 14 Sep 2020 22.44 AEST
Last modified on Wed 16 Sep 2020 06.56 AEST


Mitch McConnell’s sounded ‘all but liberated from any more pressure to show compassion before the election’ after the failure of the ‘skinny’ Covid-19 relief bill. Photograph: Michael Brochstein/Sopa Images/Rex/Shutterstock

Many more links.

The 31 million Americans struggling with unemployment today are not a whit less desperate and fearful now that Mitch McConnell’s “skinny” Covid-19 relief bill failed to pass the US Senate. Thursday’s performative theatrics did little more than provide cover to vulnerable Republicans and add one more day to the now six weeks since Senate Republicans refused to extend the extra $600 in Covid-related weekly jobless benefits. With McConnell sounding all but liberated from any more pressure to show compassion before the election, and the media’s attention pinned to shinier Trumpian objects, it is even more imperative to refocus on the crisis at hand and to dig beneath the hollow excuses for such demonstrable indifference on the part of lawmakers. It is time to find an answer to the question: how is such unnecessary suffering justified?

According to the Republicans, the aid is “too generous” and “disincentivizes” the unemployed from seeking work. So perverse are the effects of these benefits, they argue, that it is actually workers gaming the system who are slowing the economic recovery, not the Covid-driven loss of millions of jobs.

That these charges persist despite significant evidence .. https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/chicago-fed-letter/2020/441 .. to the contrary .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-myth-of-unemployment-benefits-depressing-work/2020/08/03/54cca9f4-d5ba-11ea-9c3b-dfc394c03988_story.html .. testifies to the power of the conservative creed that few things in life are more perilous than excess government compassion: “unearned” income such as unemployment benefits perversely undermines recipients’ self-discipline and willingness to work, leaving them even worse off. It is a self-evident truth of human nature, conservatives avow, that relieving the suffering of those in need induces dependence and indolence, whereas deprivation incentivizes labor.

Here’s the secret sauce: since that which is “self-evident”, such as ideas about human nature, can be neither proved nor disproved, such truths are conveniently immune to debunking evidence .. https://www.salon.com/2020/08/04/studies-debunk-mnuchin-claim-that-600-benefit-is-a-disincentive-to-work/ . Thus they persist .. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/23/skivers-strivers-200-year-old-myth-wont-die .

They should not, however, be immune from being called out for their stunning inconsistency. In 2017 these same Republicans trumpeted a radically different truth about human nature when they pronounced that cutting taxes on the wealthy would incentivize them to work harder, invest more and spur rapid economic growth.

But how is it that extra money incentivizes the rich to become paragons of moral virtue and economic rainmakers, whereas for working people it incentivizes them to become social parasites and economic saboteurs? How can there be one human nature for the 1%, and another for the rest of us?

It’s a question too rarely asked. So deeply rooted in Anglo-American political culture is this bifurcated view of human nature that it’s treated almost like natural law. In fact, it’s a product of history, originally designed to solve a problem not unlike our own, and tied to the early capitalist need for a new industrial workforce.

In the last decades of the 18th century, the English upper classes revolted against the tax burden of the centuries-old system of poor relief – so named not because it was welfare but because “the poor” were simply those who had to work for a living. As protection against cyclical structural unemployment, its recipients bore no stigma, and access to its benefits was considered a right.

When the need for jobless benefits escalated under the pressures of early industrialization, angry taxpayers found an advocate in Thomas Malthus, who turned centuries of social policy on its head by asserting that poverty was caused not by systemic unemployment but by government assistance .. https://umich.box.com/s/9gzynch3i7vg2ua1bznms94mryw5mp97 .. itself. Providing the template for today’s Steve Mnuchins and Lindsey Grahams, he explained that aid to the jobless perversely incentivized them not to seek work.

Malthus based his argument on a novel view of human nature: society consisted of two “races”: property owners and laborers. While the first embodied the high morality of Enlightenment rationality, the latter were not moral actors but motivated only by their biological instincts. When hungry, they were industrious; when full, they lazed. They did little more than think through their bodies.

As in the natural world, maintaining chronic scarcity was the necessary motor of the whole system. Since the pangs of hunger alone disciplined the poor to work, if you remove that scarcity by “artificial” means – and nothing was more artificial than government assistance – the incentive to work dissolves. But it was not enough to simply abolish public assistance, although Malthus is rightfully credited for his role in doing just that. He also railed apocalyptically .. https://umich.box.com/s/vc6e3cxh3yrsv00zq5brv7ikyfr81wyf .. against reducing scarcity through charity. Society’s very future depended on the unemployed being fully exposed to the harsh discipline of the labor market.

Malthus’s enduring contribution to social policy was thus to make hunger the virtuous suffering that underpins a productive workforce, and “too much” the virtuous luxury that unleashes the social contributions of the rich. Armed with these two views of humanity – the rich depicted as noble paragons, the poor as inherently indolent and parasitic – conservative social policy continues to declaim the unfounded “truth” that a strong economy depends on inflicting pain on workers while providing government largesse to the rich.

The most recent iteration began with Reagan’s massive tax cuts in tandem with his attacks on “welfare queens”. It continued through the derisive conservative trope of “makers and takers” to Mitt Romney’s infamous “47%” of “entitled” “tax shirkers” to former House speaker John Boehner’s 2014 claim that the jobless think “I really don’t have to work … I’d rather just sit around” to today’s tax-cutting Republicans, who announced that they will extend jobless benefits “over our dead bodies”.

To be sure, today’s policymakers would be hard pressed to name the Malthusian roots of their belief in the perils of compassion. But that makes it no less urgent to expose their policies as based on nothing more than historical fiction. For there is a darker message lurking within this view of human nature: Reducing working people to their bodily instincts robs them of their moral worth and, as we know from how our “essential” workers have been treated, makes them utterly disposable.

Margaret Somers is Professor of Sociology and History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her most recent book, co-authored with Fred Block, is The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique (Harvard, 2016)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/14/republican-skinny-coronavirus-relief-mitch-mcconnell

[SoxFan]

I agree the Democratic Party is the party of the more educated. People who can critically think and less susceptible to grifters and lies. Plus they are more accepting of people and try to flush out hate of the "other."

[B402]

Well rewarded corporate useful idiots who sold out the middle class...

Dems used the middle class as their springboard to riches
They are after all, The smartest guys in the room

https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2023/04/13/democrats-now-represent-9-of-the-10-wealthiest-congressional-districts-in-the-us-n543617

"To quote Lennon, "They were useful idiots"

The Democrats were the one that were supposed to say no

They were the check and balance
But everyone has a price eh...

Dems didn't just sell out to the Corps
Dems Sold out half the US population to them.....And btw
It takes a special kinda of person to betray the ones who's trust you'd gained
And then,, come out of it with an elitist attitude back at them

Quite the difference from the dems that rose the middle class up

Dems are now the party of the wealthy and that's a fact....
What happened to the country along the way?

How's it working out ?