ELISE PATKOTAK
COMMENT
Published: October 11th, 2011 07:15 PM
Last Modified: October 11th, 2011 07:16 PM
Class warfare. It's the latest campaign buzzword. Try to have any reasonable discussion of our financial troubles, huge federal deficit and sinking middle class that includes asking the rich to kick in a few more bucks and you are accused of class warfare. Yet somehow, the fact that about 400 families in America now control 50 percent of its wealth is not seen in the same light.
So if I have this correct, it's class warfare when any attempt is made to have the very wealthy pay an incrementally small amount of their incredible wealth to keep America financially sound. But squeezing the middle class out of existence by destroying any semblance of their social safety net isn't.
The truth is that when the middle class is squeezed, it tends to squeeze downward, not upward, thereby putting more pressure on just those programs targeted by conservatives and the Tea Party for the biggest cuts. It's as though they are trying to negate centuries of human progress and go back to a world in which survival of the strongest is the only law of the land.
It's apparently not class warfare to try to squeeze an entire class out of existence rather than tap a class whose future seems fairly assured. Considered by the government as too big to fail and so in need of being bailed out whenever their machinations threaten to destroy our economy -- a luxury not available to the middle or lower classes -- these people are called the job creators. Well, I know a lot of unemployed Americans who feel that the only jobs being created with tax dollars used to bail the super rich out are being created in other countries. In America, not so much.
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If I understand the logic that is used in coming to that conclusion, it seems to be that the rich have somehow earned their riches and deserve every single penny while the poor are obviously lazy slugs who should just die off because they clutter up our world with their neediness. The fact that many of the super rich are rich thanks to the efforts of their grandparents or great-grandparents and the only contribution they have made to the world is showing up at nightclubs without underpants seems to get lost in that logic.
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Read more:
http://www.adn.com/2011/10/11/2115758/class-warfare-in-the-eye-of-the.html#disqus_thread#ixzz1aXc53qQNI got some early comments in. I usually don't engage with these people, but this time they're so pathetically misinformed or maybe deliberately obtuse, I had to get my two cents in.
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