No middle class, no republic: GOP plans to destroy Americas safety net will also kill democracy
by Thom Hartman, Alternet, Salon
http://www.salon.com/2016/12/25/no-middle-class-no-republic-gop-plans-to-destroy-americas-safety-net-will-also-kill-democracy_partner/
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For thousands of years, economists and economic observers from Aristotle to Adam Smith to Thomas Picketty have told us that a “middle class” is not a normal by-product of raw, unregulated capitalism — what right-wing ideologues call “the free market.”
Instead, unregulated markets — particularly markets not regulated by significant taxation on predatory incomes — invariably lead to the opposite of a healthy middle class: They produce extremes of inequality, which are as dangerous to democracy as cancer is to a living being.
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As Ian Milheiser notes, “Republicans in the House hope to cut Social Security benefits by 20 to 50 percent. Speaker Paul Ryan’s plan to voucherize Medicare would drive up out-of-pocket costs for seniors by about 40 percent. Then he’d cut Medicaid by between a third and a half.”
If Gingrich, Ryan, et al succeed in destroying FDR’s legacy programs, not only will the bottom 90 percent of Americans suffer, but what little democracy we have left in this republic will evaporate, and history suggests it will probably be replaced by a violent,
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