Poverty pimps owe middle class $22 trillion in reparations
Presidential candidate Donald Trump's newly released tax plan is putting the plight of the middle class in the spotlight. On Sunday, Trump told CBS News anchor Scott Pelley his tax plan is "a substantial reduction for the middle-income people ... [b]ecause our middle class, Scott, is being absolutely decimated." The decline of the middle class has been going on for over 50 years, and no politician, pundit, or media outlet has focused on it sufficiently.
Who are the poverty pimps?
Any politicians who have ever voted for legislation that took money out of Americans' pockets and put it in failed programs in the manufactured War on Poverty. Any activists, including clergy, who have lobbied for more funding for failed programs. Any progressive radicals who have called for an end to capitalism in favor of creating a majority of low-income workers. Any nonprofits that have brought in billions over the last 50 years in the name of eradicating poverty.
Who are the middle class?
The backbone of the American economy. They are property owners, product manufacturers, job creators, the farming population, small businesses, salaried and hourly employees including salesmen, clerks, managers, and professionals.
A few days before Trump's 60 Minutesinterview, socialist MIT professor Noam Chomsky called for reparations for the descendants of slaves who built this country "roughly 400 years ago." Chomsky didn't stop there. He suggested that reparations be given to any oppressed group here or overseas suffering because of U.S. government policies.
Another up-and-coming leftist radical, Ta-Nehisi Coates, made a lengthy case for reparations for blacks in an Atlantic Monthly cover story last year. In an epigraph, he quotes John Locke's Second Treatise, in which the philosopher suggests that any group injured by others' transgressions has a right not only to ask for punishment for the transgressor, but to "seek reparations" for the wrongdoing. Coates also refers to "quiet, systemic, submerged plunder" as the essential feature of slavery. He contends that "past plunder" has made present-day plunder "more efficient."
Truer words could not have been spoken about middle-income American earners. Chomsky's and Coates's rationale could easily apply to people whose paychecks have been taken by the government and squandered on failed social initiatives that encourage immorality and dependency. The "quiet plunder" of middle-class money and labor to fund Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty began in 1964. Playing the poverty/civil rights card, politicians pushed through legislation to spread the wealth around under the guise of increasing opportunities for the "poor." The middle class ended up getting hammered.
In 2014, the Heritage Foundation releasedtheir findings on the cost of the War on Poverty. As of 2013, U.S. taxpayers had spent over $22 trillion on anti-poverty programs. What did we get for all of our hard labor 50 years later? An ever-expanding welfare state instead of what LBJ described as an "investment" that would "return its cost manifold to the entire economy." Not only are 100 millionAmericans receiving some kind of benefits from at least one government program, but those not on the dole are still paying for entitlements with no end in sight.
Like slaves, the middle class are asked to turn over the fruits of their labor to others and at the same time endure name-calling and marginalization from the very same people taking their money.
At the start of every Congress since 1989, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) has introduced a reparations bill that would set up a seven-member commission to determine whether "any form of compensation to the descendants of African slaves is warranted."
What House member will introduce a bill calling for a congressional study of middle-class "slavery" as well as make recommendations to repay the $22 trillion spent to destroy the American Dream
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