Whirring propaganda machines: USA Today article seeks to gin up class hate

There’s apparently no end to how far the mainstream operatives will go in their quest to destroy the virtues of the West, and a USA Today article published last week is a prime example.

The man behind the piece, Daniel de Visé, essentially implies that anyone not born into tremendous wealth doesn’t have a chance at success, and those who are rich only got that way by mere circumstance and birthright, overtly implying that capitalism has caused this problem and that, we must work harder for equality.

There are huge problems with de Visé’s article, but I will do my best to tackle a few of them to explain how the premise is entirely wrong. (The italicized blurbs are excerpted from the item.)

Over the years, the rich have grown steadily richer. The top 1% caught and passed the middle class in collective wealth in late 2020, Fed data shows.

This article covers the years 1979 through 2021; the problem with this statement is that the top 1% of people in 2021 are not the same as the people in the top 1% in 1979. Capitalism has always allowed people to move up the economic ladder. The richest 1% of people are always getting richer in a growing economy.

And who are the top 1%? The category includes flashy billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, of course. But many 1%-ers are low-profile multimillionaires, living quietly among us.

This is a true statement but since Bezos and Musk weren’t very rich twenty years ago it shows how capitalism, invention, and creativity allows people to create wealth regardless of circumstances.

‘As you go up the wealth distribution, it’s more and more these private business owners,’ Zidar said. ‘And a lot of them are boring businesses. Auto dealers. Beverage distributors. People who own seven Jiffy Lubes.’

I bet most of the people in this category weren’t in the top 1% thirty or forty years ago. Capitalism allows for risk-taking. Thank goodness we have people who are willing to risk their money, or borrow it, to create jobs. I bet a lot of these people don’t have college degrees.

Why the rich keep getting richer, compared to everyone else, is a topic of recurring debate among the nation’s economists.

…

Owning a private business: The upper 1% owns nearly half of all private-company wealth today, up from about 30% in 1990, the Fed reports.

Again, these are not the same people as the ones in 1990, these are new “one-percenters” whose ideas, work ethic, or savvy entrepreneurialism facilitated their move up the ladder. People move up and down the spectrum—thank goodness.

Stocks and home prices soared in the low-interest years that followed the onset of the Great Recession in 2008.

‘People who owned homes, who owned stocks, who owned retirement accounts, they did very well,’ Princeton’s Zidar said. ‘And a lot of people don’t own homes, and a lot of people don’t own stocks, so they missed out on that opportunity.’

Would de Visé prefer the prices of real estate and stocks never climbed, or declined in value? Would that achieve more equality?

Between 1979 and 2021, the wages of Americans in the top 1% grew by 206%, after adjusting for inflation, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute. In the same years, wages for the bottom 90% grew by only 29%.

Again, this is a different group of people. Most of us people in the middle or upper middle class started in the bottom quintile.

I made $4 an hour coming out of college in 1974, had $10 in the bank, no car, no home, and no stocks along with a $2,000 student loan, which I paid off (not the government). I had a negative net worth. I was poor. I assume most people in my boat moved up the economic ladder pretty well if they worked over 45 years straight as I did.  Thank goodness for capitalism and opportunities, unlike socialism and communism which allow little or no economic mobility.

The stagnation of wages and wealth among middle-class Americans, experts say, feeds a growing sense of economic ennui. Middle-class Americans have reason to fear for their economic future.

They sure do if the government keeps seeking to control everything we do and buy! 

‘When people feel like they don’t have a chance, or perhaps even more dangerously, when they feel like their kids don’t have a chance . . . that inequality of opportunity is what really gets people upset,’ said John Friedman, chair of the economics department at Brown University.

Stagnant wealth hinders middle-class Americans from getting a top-drawer education, starting a business, or landing a high-wage job, said Zidar of Princeton.

What an egotistical and obnoxious statement: “top-drawer education” implies Ivy League. They consider the rest of us inferior. Ivy League schools essentially indoctrinate instead of educate, which is how you get so many who support terrorists and the killing of Jews. These same people would equate President Trump to Adolf Hitler. When these skulls full of mush graduate, they think they are superior to the “bottom-drawer” Americans, and they infect society with their radical ideology. Their diploma, without reason, common sense, knowledge and experience, is as worthless as a carbon credit.

‘It’s really bad for the growth of the country if a small number of people whose parents happen to be rich are the ones who do well,’ he said.

This is pure BS to gin up hate. It is meant to tell poor kids they have no chance. They are oppressed. It is as mentally damaging as Critical Race Theory, or telling children that capitalism and humans are destroying the planet and we only have a few years left unless we let the government confiscate more money and power from us. Big government is always the solution for Democrats.

Making more people dependent on the government is especially destructive, because it leads to generational poverty.

Having policies that encourage the break-up of the family, like the Great Society and anti-poverty programs of the 1960s, leads to generational poverty.

In 1960 around 5% of women giving birth were single. Now it is around 50%. Single parenthood leads to generational poverty and blocks the creation of wealth.

Policies that seek to destroy companies that produce reasonably-priced energy and other products will greatly harm the poor and middle class which prohibits them from achieving financial security.

Four of the richest ten counties in the country are around… Washington D.C., where they produce nothing. Yet most of the media and other Democrats want to confiscate more money and power for themselves. That certainly does not help the poor or middle class.

There is a sure way to achieve more wealth equality. Have the economy collapse. Real estate and stock prices would be decimated. Businesses would go broke. Now it wouldn’t help the poor or middle class, but they wouldn’t lose as much as the rich. Looking at Democrat policies, that seems to be their goal. There is no scientific data that shows our consumption of oil, coal, natural gas, or meat controls temperatures, yet they want to destroy tens of millions of jobs that are directly or indirectly dependent on those products.

Maybe their real goal is to just destroy all that made America great?

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