Americans: Bernie Sanders or Hilary Clinton

[downbeatplumb]

I wonder how many more years it would take to flush the entire middle class down the toilet under republican leadership.

You cannot can lay the decline of the Middle Class all at the feet of the Republican party. The Congressional Republicans only make show votes. Obama has pretty much gotten every thing he's wanted. Even then, I'm entirely convinced that the very existence of a 'middle class' isn't just a historical anomaly. Perhaps, the rich-poor divide is the default position and trying to cling to the model of how we think things should be versus how they actually work may blind us to other possible, perhaps even more effective, social orders.

I mean, in the West we have already largely solved the problem of absolute poverty. Our poor have cable television, cell phones, and indoor plumbing. What we have now is relative poverty in which the poor do have enough to live but just not as much as others that unsurprisingly live better. Any remaining absolute poverty is largely the result of poor decisions, mental illness, or evil. Those problems require a different kind of intervention that 'basic income'.

Not in the UK they don't, we have an underclass that has developed under the tories that relies on food hand outs, do not have enough money so get more and more in debt that they will never pay and have inadequate housing, we often have exposes on this issue but the government is now entirely made up of millionaires who completely lack empathy. I'm pretty sure this also the case for the US.