Dear MAGA: Open Topic 20190104

There is NO consistency to progressive ideology. It morphs continuously, camouflaging something that is obvious wrong like a chameleon into something that people don’t recognize, or better yet, think is cute and cuddly as an adoptable pet. The more they distort and recreate themselves, they take on a life of their own.
Income inequality is a perfect example of Marxism being reheated to sound like modern economics with the “Gini Coefficient”. The model assumes a zero sum game where all economic value is fixed. The only way to have “economic justice” with “income inequality” is to ensure that everyone has the same amount. But the only way to achieve that goal is to reduce all the high incomes until they match the lowest income. Talk about a gamed system – the only “justice” is for nobody to have nuthin!
Much more important is “Income Mobility” – the ability of people in the lowest brackets of income inequality to move to higher brackets. There is a high degree of economic dynamism in the United States (ie, not a fixed “zero sum” system) that allows the poorest of people to move over time to better economic positions. (Conversely, the richest of the rich is also highly dynamic, as the highly wealthy rarely stay in the highest economic brackets for more than a few years.) This is critical because “income mobility” is what allows for people to have different and positive economic outcomes, where focusing on “income inequality” reframes economic conversations into the inherent “injustice” of having any wealth(!) at all.
This is where the MAGA effect of the Trump economy is incredible. The prior administration lectured us about our “shared responsibility” in addressing “income inequality” and the need for “economic justice”. The result was a wrenching and squeezing out of the middle class in the United States, gutting it out, and leaving millennials locked out of the economic system. Now here comes Trump, and he’s reversing all this dogmatic rhetoric with a focus on “jobs” and “opportunities” – because the best anti-poverty tool that exists is called a J-O-B (Can I get an “AMEN”?) and having J-O-B’s where labor is in high demand and wages INCREASE!
(Seriously – how can these people look in the mirror and live with themselves when they mutter on about how they care about the poor and “income inequality” and “economic justice” when they are keeping the poor trapped in a plantation with no economic prospects? My best guess is they are either rationally clueless about the damage they are doing and think only with their emotions, or they have psychopathic traits where they don’t care about others at all but virtue signal strictly as a means to power, having no conscience whatsoever.)
For all the prior administrations hand-wringing and finger-wagging about income inequality, for eight years they did NOTHING that would move the needle of OUTCOMES in the positive direction. Just the opposite, they made the problems phenomenally worse, and rewarded the richest of the rich for their support of the Democrat party! Think of it: The party of OWS and opposing the 1% was privately giving those same 1% massive benefits, with the payoff being donor dollars during the election!
In two years, Trump has done more to improve REAL OUTCOMES for the poor and middle class than the entire eight years of the prior administration. For that matter, for administration going back to at least 1988 – which means 30 years of economic policy and pretty-sounding rhetoric about helping the poor has been completely a load of BALONEY compared with just two years in setting the economic policy straight for American workers.
In short:
-> Trump cares about the poor and underemployed, and delivers for them.
-> Measuring from policy decisions and outcomes, no other recent administration did.
-> The prior administration, AT BEST, must be regarded as incompetent and hypocritical in the extreme, as delivering positive outcomes for the poor was NEVER a policy priority.