Republicans advance the interests of the wealthy. They say the best way to benefit the economy is to stimulate it from the top.
Democrats understand that the best way to grow the economy is to stimulate it from the bottom. We feel good when we support underprivileged people. We know in our bones that this giving alms is morally superior to skewing benefits toward the wealthy. But it is more than that. American history has shown time and time again that providing benefits to the underprivileged is the most effective way to grow the economy and increase the wealth of all. We can do well by doing good.
Democrats and progressives understand that true equality of opportunity means that some people need a hand up. This is the opposite of the false equality of opportunity promised by laissez-faire libertarian Republicans.
Martin Luther King was right to proclaim it shameful to tolerate poverty in the face of the greatest wealth and the greatest income gap the world has ever known. History will judge us by how we treat the least among us.
In his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Martin Luther King said:
It is obvious that if a man is to redeem his spiritual and moral ‘lag,’ he must go all out to bridge the social and economic gulf between the ‘haves’ and ‘have not’s’ of the world. Poverty is one of the most urgent items on the agenda of modern life.
There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it. . . The time has come for an all- out world war against poverty.
People in need are still waiting for us to take up Dr. King’s challenge.
The TEA party, the Freedom Caucus, the Koch brothers, and their friends masquerade as libertarians. They encourage blue collar workers to resent underprivileged Americans. They tell the working class that poor people benefit from government programs funded by taxes on the working class. They don’t tell the working class that most of the Republican tax cuts benefit the wealthy.
We need to call out this lie. We need to show working Americans that most of the benefit from the neo-libertarian Republican agenda goes to the top 10%, that most of that benefit goes to the top 1%, and that most of that benefit goes to the top 0.1%. Most of the cost goes to the bottom 90%.
Neo-libertarian and Republican propaganda has convinced blue collar workers to resent the people harmed by the Republican agenda. They should resent the neo-libertarians and the Republicans. They should resent the people who benefit from the Republican agenda. They should resent programs that damage the American economy and the environment in order to provide benefits to selfish interest groups at our expense.
