FSP crowd winces at truth

The Sun published an editorial saying a lot of things that I have been saying and what has been said at Red Maryland for a long time: Democrats don't care about the working class anymore:

Today's ascendant liberalism isn't driven by the lunch-pail concerns of those workers struggling to make it in an increasingly high-tech, information-based, outsourcing U.S. economy - though it does pay lip service to them.

Rather, such "gentry liberalism" reflects the interests and values of the affluent winners in the era of globalization and the beneficiaries of the "financialization" of the economy. Just as the number of industrial workers and traditional middle-class households has declined, the ranks of the affluent class have grown. And although many of the newly affluent are - as is traditional - politically conservative, a rising number of them are turning left. Surveys by the Pew Research Center indicate that an increasing number of households with annual incomes greater than $135,000 are moving toward the Democrats.

Of course, this is all 100% accurate. Today's liberals are too concerned with protecting special interests, the interests of big business, and playing to pet issues special to urban liberals than they are with the plight of the working and middle classes. All one has to do is to look at the recent special session, with massive tax hikes aimed at the middle class, to see the damaging effects of this new breed liberalism.

Eric Luedtke of Free State Politics responds the way that urban liberals always respond; he whines:

The idea that the Democratic Party has moved away from working class and middle class concerns is an equally ridiculous argument. Maryland's a great example of that. Any list of Democratic success in Maryland over the last few years will mention the living wage, the increase in the minimum wage, work on making college more affordable, support for public education, and expansion of health care support. In fact, the only specific example the authors mention is climate change, arguing that climate change legislation hurts the working class despite the massive number of new jobs that are already being created by the green economy.

This is straight out of the Karl Rove playbook: spread lies and hope to confuse the voters enough to get elected. The Republican Party knows that any chance they have of ever reclaiming the working and middle class 'Reagan Democrats' is quickly slipping away, so these two conservatives desperately try to tie the Democrats to an anti-worker label. To bad all the real world evidence is contrary to everything they say.

And all of which Luedtke wrote above is, of course, total crap. The living wage bill drives up the cost of government, thus creating the need for higher and higher taxes or (if a realistic view of the budget was employed, for once) reduced government services. The living wage, combined with the minimum wage hike, creates localized inflation that inflates the cost of all low-wage jobs in the area, artificially inflating the prices of goods and services in that area. That of course negates those rises in wages, and also diminishes the purchasing power of the middle class.

The expansion of health care supports necessitated, what else, more regressive taxes that disproportionately impact the working classes, those who are most likely to purchase cigarettes.

The only support for public education the Democrats show in Maryland is support for higher wages of teachers. Nobody is too concerned with actually improving education in Maryland, because it is far more important for Democrats to kowtow to the MSTA than it is to worry about educating students.

And it is hard to argue that Maryland Democrats are for lowering the costs of higher education when salaries and benefits for professors and administrators at these schools continue to skyrocket.

And this says nothing of Congressional Democrats who want to (what else) raise taxes, bankrupt government with more unnecessary social programs, and ignore our national security.

Luedtke's knee-jerk reaction to the column in the Sun probably has less to do with a repulsion to Republicanism and more a reaction to a slow realization that is probably very disturbing to him. Luedtke, his party, and this ideas he and the party believe in, are anti-worker, anti-consumer, and anti-Middle Class, and that he and his ilk are clearly working behalf of the rich who think they know how to run the lives of individual Americans better than the individuals do.

The modern Democratic Party, and these modern-day urban liberals don't support democracy as we know it. These Democrats support a modern-day Plutocracy, and they would prefer that you didn't point it out to them...