{"id":186275,"date":"2014-03-12T19:31:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-13T00:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/03\/12\/nothing-is-the-matter-with-kansas\/"},"modified":"2014-03-12T19:31:00","modified_gmt":"2014-03-13T00:31:00","slug":"nothing-is-the-matter-with-kansas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/03\/12\/nothing-is-the-matter-with-kansas\/","title":{"rendered":"Nothing is the Matter With Kansas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Thomas Frank in his book, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/offer-listing\/B007CVWVR0\/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=B007CVWVR0&amp;linkCode=am2&amp;tag=40yeainthedes-20\"><i>What&#8217;s the Matter with Kansas?<\/i><\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=40yeainthedes-20&amp;l=am2&amp;o=1&amp;a=B007CVWVR0\" height=\"1\" style=\"border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;\" width=\"1\" \/> he is flummoxed about why the so-called American heartland vote against their economic interests when they vote &#8220;God, Guns, and Gays&#8221; social issues.<\/p>\n<p>Well, over at MoJo, Kevin Drum notes that any serious analysis, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/kevin-drum\/2014\/03\/if-democrats-want-appeal-working-class-they-really-need-some-policies-benefit-wor?google_editors_picks=true\">Democrats have done virtually nothing for the middle class in 30 years<\/a>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He&#8217;s right.&nbsp; The&nbsp; Democrat Party&#8217;s record on economic for the middle class, and the poor is amazingly weak tea when compared to anyone but the Republicans:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">There are two problems with the Democratic approach. First, it&#8217;s too abstract to appeal to anyone. Second, it&#8217;s not true anyway. Democrats simply don&#8217;t consistently support concrete policies that help the broad working and middle classes. Half of them voted for the bankruptcy bill of 2005. They&#8217;ve done virtually nothing to stem the growth of monopolies and next to nothing to improve consumer protection in visible ways. They don&#8217;t do anything for labor. They&#8217;re soft on protecting Social Security. They bailed out the banks but refused to bail out underwater homeowners. Hell, they can&#8217;t even agree to kill the carried interest loophole, a populist favorite if ever there was one.<\/p>\n<p>Sure, Democrats do plenty for the poor. They support increases in the EITC and the minimum wage. They support Medicaid expansion. They passed Obamacare. They support pre-K for vulnerable populations. They expanded CHIP. But virtually none of this really benefits the working or middle classes except at the margins.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Democrats have been unwilling to do any more than nibble around the edges for years.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s all about extracting large donations from rich people, which requires that you support policies that make them richer and richer, and this money is extracted from the rest of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thomas Frank in his book, What&#8217;s the Matter with Kansas? he is flummoxed about why the so-called American heartland vote against their economic interests when they vote &#8220;God, Guns, and Gays&#8221; social issues. Well, over at MoJo, Kevin Drum notes that any serious analysis, &#8220;Democrats have done virtually nothing for the middle class in 30 &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1094,1051,1143,978,983],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-finance","category-hypocrisy","category-inequality","category-politics","category-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186275"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186275\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}