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Do Americans Want Our Middle Class Back?
Elizabeth Warren has a plan, and it’s great, if only Republicans weren’t committed to fighting it tooth and nail. But first some backstory…
Most Americans, having never studied Civics in school since Reagan stopped federal support for it, don’t realize that a middle class is not a normal thing.
It has to be intentionally created, by law, by having government “interfere” in the so-called “free market” on behalf of labor.
What we today call the middle class — the ability to raise a family, buy a house and car, take a vacation, save for old age — was, until the 1940s, typically very small in the United States, as it was in much of the rest of the developed world.
Most Americans today have no idea that Charles Dickens’ descriptions of life in England were also pretty accurate depictions of life for the working class here in the United States around that time, as well.
That era in the UK and the United States reflected the normal “resting state“ of capitalism when it has not been regulated by government. You see it, literally, all over the world today in countries where governments have not passed laws to specifically empower working people by giving them union rights.
There was a very tiny number of very rich people, with a small professional middle…
