Hank has a point.

The middle class has always had its share of welfare giveaways; not as much as the upper classes, of course, but certainly more than the poor. Its this middle class welfare that has allowed the rich to command the support of the bourgeosie, and to have them collaborate in their own exploitation and vote against their own best interests. In essence, the Bosses bribed the Babbitts and Bunkers to vote for them by offering them the crumbs off their table and even promising them their own seat in some distant, indefinite future. The Bubbas got food stamps and Public Defenders.

But today, for a variety of reasons (the whole pie is shrinking, the rich are greedier than ever, and the shrinking middle and working classes who actually pay the lion's share of the bills, are suffering from rising prices, wage stagnation and approaching tax saturation) the situation is nearing a crisis. What is happening today in American politics (and to a great extent, in all the industrialized Western democracies) cannot be understood until this dynamic is recognized. The Babbitts and Bunkers are finally seeing themselves being progressively marginalized and they have been convinced it is all the Bubba's fault. Who wins? Only the Bosses. Follow the money.

So how is the middle class subsidized by this insidious welfare, you may ask? Well, I will use myself as an example. My family was working class; my mother a secretary and my stepfather an immigrant auto body shop worker. I was able to break the cycle by going to college, because I attended a cheap state-supported school (taxpayer subsidy) and payed for it with GI Bill (also payed for by the taxpayer) Part of that GI Bill was my natural father's (a sheet metal worker) who died when I was 4 years old, and part of it was my own. Both my mother and I purchased homes using VA benefits; again, both my late father's and my own. Mom and I both wrote off a substantial portion of our income taxes using our mortgage interest deductions (and a host of others that primarily benefit those who can afford the initial ante and get in the game). Again, this is another taxpayer-subsidized benefit. One, by the way, which benefited the financial and home construction industries, and perhaps even the entire nation. But the point is, unless you could afford the price of admission like the middle class, these collateral benefits were mostly denied to you. The poor were much less likely to get a mortgage or send their kids to college, even if they technically qualified for mortgage tax deductions and GI Bill.

I'm not saying these benefits I and so many other working and middle class people enjoyed are a bad thing. On the contrary, they are an excellent way to redistribute resources from the rich to the poor. This brings the poor up and prevents the rich from eventually accumulating ALL the money and power. It is the triumph of Western social welfare democracies in the twentieth century, and even if the middle classes benefited disproportionately from these New Deal policies, it was certainly better than nothing.

But the giveaway is expensive, and the upper classes no longer want to pay their share. They want tax cuts, they want someone else to pay the tax bill, or not have a bill at all, and they want no part of the regulations that control industry and protect the environment, the worker, the consumer and the market place. As always, they want it all.

The cost of energy has gone up. The cost of housing has gone up. The cost of education has gone up. Even the cost of credit has gone up! All the commodities that allowed for upward social mobility are now in short supply, and now they are going after medical care (even Medicare and child care): pretty soon only those who can afford medical insurance will have access to medical care at all. Even political power is now up for sale. As the prices rise to reveal the true effect of those hidden subsidies, the middle class shrinks, not because they are lazier or dumber, but simply because they are now poorer. The middle class is still there, they just are working shit jobs now, or they're not working at all.

The rich (represented predominantly by the political Right) has managed to bring this about by skilfully dividing the population, and convincing the middle and working classes that their true enemies are the poor, the immigrants, and the colored; and some undefined intellectual elite that has mobilized these unfortunate
masses against them. You will note that the financial and property elites are never included among these villains even though they are the ones with the most to gain! In other words, those with the means, motive and opportunity to benefit from our current problems are never even considered as a possible cause of them. Instead, we are told that our true class enemies are movie stars, artists, scientists, college professors and journalists, writers and intellectuals. Even the bourgeois distrust of the intellect has been mobilized for political purposes, along with racism, nativism and classism.

Of course the other side of the political aisle shares some of the blame as well: They are guilty of cowardice, complacency and laziness. They are the Chamberlains that made the Hitlers possible. And now we have a Congress and Presidency crowded with Quislings.