Y'all, I think I'm going to concentrate my clicks elsewhere, going forward (meaning elsewhere on this site, not completely somewhere else).
But before I go, a couple of things.
1) Keep blaming the poor for being poor.
2) Keep telling yourselves that all government (or merely most) is bad government. Think about the United States' best moments and achievements, and consider how many of them happened in lieu of or in spite of government intervention. I'll click back here to see what you list, at least a little bit.
3) Keep telling yourself that the guy who's raison d'etre is making fun of people who disagree with him isn't fanning the flames of hatred and division in this country.
4) This is probably my only substantive point: you like to point to government safety net problems as the cause of the nations social ills, but those programs were implemented because of those ills. While you point to the Great Society as the reason for poverty and the shrinking middle class, the loss of union power in the private sector correlates even better with the decline of the middle class. Unions (for all their faults, and like any person-run organization, they have plenty of them) helped distribute wealth to the working class, rather than to the ownership class. It worked for much of the post-war period, but in the 1970s union power started to decline. Unions have always been in the cross hairs of the ownership class because they do just that, they distribute wealth down to the workers, which, in turn, protects the middle class. One unfortunate thing that Badge--or one of you, anyway--hinted at above was the clash between the civil rights movement and the private labor unions. Labor unions exist to force management to the bargaining table over wages/benefits and to protect jobs. However, when the civil rights movement gained momentum, that created a conflict between protecting jobs and giving black people (primarily) a seat at the union bargaining table. The ownership class, which has predominantly been Republican, has been more than happy to exploit that schism to keep working class laborers struggling against the civil rights movement, and vice versa. However, we're now at a point in our country's history that private labor unions have lost much of their power, but they are no longer the bastion of whiteness that they were in the 1950s. If private labor were to regain strength today, the clash over job protection and race has largely vanished, so a rising labor movement would raise all working class labor, not just white (or black, latino, etc.) labor.
In the short term, stronger private labor unions might put a dent in my 401K, but in the long term, they would make for a stronger middle class, less poverty, a rising standard of living, and a more stable, better country.
Alright--time for me to (mostly) read other threads.
