Boss
Take a Memo:
The problem with you is that you're one- dimensional in your thinking. For you, everything is either black or white. Collective bargaining was one of myriad tools used by the Democrats to assist FDR in expanding the American middle class. The GI Bill was another. Veterans returning from World War II were given unprecedented opportunities to enter into middle class status due to Democrat initiatives. Social Security and other benefits came out of that era. And we haven't forgotten that the Republicans have been trying to destroy Social Security and the middle class itself ever since.
I never posited that the middle class was a group made up of the same people all the time. Indeed, the boundaries of the middle class are ambiguous and ever-changing. As you said, people move in and out of it all the time; but, that does not mean it doesn't exist as a body of people classified by certain income levels.
Now I will reciprocate and return your compliment. You too make some pretty good points. However, to say the dwindling middle class is a result of upward mobility is quite a stretch. The ranks of the middle class is down to 49.9 percent from 61 percent of the population in 1971, with the ranks of the poor and ultrarich growing to a majority in the US.
You keep talking about a "middle class" and I've rejected that concept because we don't have classes in America. Our system provides freedom to be in any class. You realize this, you admit it's true, then go right back to arguing about this mythical class of people that do not exist.
As I stated, middle income families have been upwardly mobile since 1967. They are becoming upper income families. Lower income families are slightly less than in 1967. Many of them have become middle income families. You say this is "a stretch" but it's not. Census Bureau data proves it's not:
All the glorious socialist things you're mentioning on behalf of FDR and Democrats have pushed us into a $20 trillion national debt with over $200 trillion in unfunded liability. In a few more years, our interest payments on the debt will be greater than the entire cost of our military. This is unsustainable.
Socialist policies are a FAILURE! They've always been a failure! They don't elevate anyone into the so-called "middle class"... they relegate everyone they touch into a dependent class and stick us with a bill we can't pay and our grandchildren will be having to deal with. FDR's first term policies were so bad he almost lost re-election. He continued the Keynesian policies Hoover started and they didn't work. That turned what would have been a normal recession like we had about every 30 years into a Great Depression.
Even Social Security, the hallmark program of FDR, is about to go tits up. Bankrupt! It cannot be sustained. If you had allowed a person back in 1950, who started paying into SS, to invest a portion of their salary into the stock market, they would be multi-millionaires now. Instead, they are left with literally nothing to show for a lifetime of contribution in a ponzi scheme that didn't work.