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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Jules Witcover
April 18, 2011
Even as budget negotiators were still babbling about who was dragging their feet on a compromise to avoid a federal government shutdown,
Ever since New Deal days, when FDR launched his agenda to broaden the middle class and throw a lifeline to the poor with what came to be called "the social safety net," the two major parties have been jousting over which of them was engaging in "class warfare."
Democrats historically have charged Republicans with resisting the basic government role of extending a helping hand to society's most disadvantaged and struggling, so clearly imperative during the Great Depression but often challenged as less warranted thereafter and now.
The Republicans in turn have cried "class warfare" against the Democrats, claiming they have worked tirelessly pitting the middle-class and particularly the lower-income strata against the better-off and the rich. One amusing twist has been fat cats sometimes defending their wealth by postulating that the poor shouldn't begrudge the better-offs because, with enterprise, they can join their ranks some day.
Ryan, in introducing his ambitious package to slash
In terms of the prime victims of Ryan's proposed cuts, however, his plan bears all the footprints of warfare against the folks on the bottom rung of the ladder to prosperity.
While Ryan interestingly ducks on
That sounds a lot like the revered Ronald Reagan's old exaggerated lament about the "welfare queen" who lived high on the hog on government checks. Ryan's proposal proceeds to resurrect the conservative litany against "the culture of dependency" that "drains individual character, which in turn weakens American society. The process suffocates individual initiative," it continues, "and transforms self-reliance into a vice and government dependency into a virtue." That too was a favorite riff of the Gipper.
"More ruinous in the long run," Ryan's pitch insists, "is the extent to which the 'safety net' has come to enmesh more and more Americans -- reaching into middle incomes and higher -- so that growing numbers have come to rely on government, not themselves, for growing shares of their income and assets.
"By this means, government increasingly dictates how Americans live their lives; they are not only wards of the state, but also its subjects, increasingly directed in their behavior by the government's 'compassion.' The Nation becomes a sort of vast Potemkin Village in which the most important elements -- its people -- are depleted by a government that increasingly 'takes care' of them, and makes ever more of their decisions for them. They take more from society than they provide for themselves, which corrodes society itself, from the inside out."
Meanwhile, Ryan not only would enhance the safety net for the greatest beneficiaries of society by making permanent Bush tax cuts that President Obama was blackmailed into accepting for another year. He also would cut the current top income and corporate tax rate from 35 to 25 percent.
The Ryan plan argues that corporate America needs these and other further tax and regulatory breaks because of the "failed debt-financed economic stimulus" pushed through by Obama. But corporate profits are soaring, the unemployment rate is finally creeping down and would drop more and faster if those corporations would desist sitting on those profits and resume hiring.
So who's waging class warfare here?
AMERICAN POLITICS
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Real Class Warfare | Politics
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