"Creating a Middle Class Is Always a Choice"

"When wealth is spread more equally among all parts of society, people start to expect more from society and start demanding more rights. That leads to social instability, which is feared and hated by conservatives, even though revolutionaries and liberals like Thomas Jefferson welcome it.
"And, as Kirk and Buckley predicted back in the 1950s, this is exactly what happened in the 1960s and '70s when taxes on the rich were at their highest. The Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement, the consumer movement, the anti-war movement, and the environmental movement–social movements that grew out of the wealth and rising expectations of the post-World War II era’s middle class–these all terrified conservatives. Which is why ever since they took power in 1980, they've made gutting working people out of the middle class their number one goal."


Thom Hartmann in Salon argues that Ronald Reagan's presidency marked the beginning of the end of the middle class.