GOP Plans to DESTROY THE SAFETY NET will also Destroy Democracy.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/gop-plans-destroy-our-safety-net-will-also-kill-democracy?akid=15033.294211.G3SL-J&rd=1&src=newsletter1069260&t=14

GOP Plans to Destroy Our Safety Net Will Also Kill Democracy

History shows that without a strong middle class, democracy itself collapses.

by Thom Hartmann

As Princeton researchers Gilens and Page demonstrated in an exhaustive analysis of the difference between what most Americans want their politicians to do legislatively, versus what American politicians actually do, it’s pretty clear that President Carter was right.

They found that while the legislative priorities of the top 10% of Americans are consistently made into law, things the bottom 90% want are ignored.  In other words, today in America, democracy only “works” for the top 10% of Americans.

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.  

With so-called “unregulated free markets,” the rich become super-rich, while grinding poverty spreads among working people like a heroin epidemic.  This further polarizes the nation, both economically and politically, which, perversely, further cements the power of the oligarchs.

for the Boomer generation: a 30 year old in the 1970s had a 90% chance of having or attaining a higher standard of living than his or her parents.  But, since the 1980s introduction of Reaganomics, there’s been more than a 70% drop in “social mobility” – the ability to move from one economic station of life into a better one.

So, if our democratic republic is to return to democracy and what’s left of our middle class is to survive (or even grow), how do we do that?  

History shows that the two primary regulators within a capitalist system that provide for the emergence of a middle class are progressive taxation and a healthy social safety net.  

As Jefferson noted in a 1785 letter to Madison, “Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.”

Tragically, Republicans are today planning to destroy both our nation’s progressive taxation system and our social safety net, in obsequious service to their billionaire paymasters.

Flipping Jefferson and FDR on their heads, Republicans are proposing multi-million-dollar tax breaks for the rich, with a few-hundred-dollars bone tossed in for working people.  

Meanwhile, Republicans are already hard at work.  

As Ian Milheiser notes, “Republicans in the House hope to cut Social Security benefits by 20–50 percent. Speaker Paul Ryan’s plan to voucherize Medicare would drive up out-of-pocket costs for seniors by about 40 percent. Then he’dcut Medicaid by between a third and a half.”  

If Newt, Ryan, et al succeed in destroying FDR’s legacy programs, not only will the bottom 90% 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, kleptocratic oligarchy.  

Hang on tight; the ride could get rough…

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