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Republicans don't give a rat's ass about working-class Americans, but they want you to think they do.
During an appearance on MSNBC's
Morning Joe today, Wisconsin Congressman Sean Duffy told host Joe Scarborough that Republicans need to change their messaging so they can connect to people "trying to move up the economic ladder."
"We have to actually take our message to where people are at,"
Duffy said. "We have moms that can't pay the utility bill, dads who can't pay the mortgage. How does our conservative ideology and philosophy actually help lift them out of the place that they are today and move them up the economic ladder? ...We don't do a good job of presenting that message, and we have to change how we're doing it."
This is the core of the problem Republicans face - there is nothing in the Republican Party's platform that actually helps people move up the economic ladder. The Republican Party's platform only helps you when you're already rich, so messaging doesn't mean anything when your policies are designed to screw working Americans and enrich the billionaires.
The Republican Party's philosophy really just boils down to two basic ideas: tax cuts for the rich and social safety net cuts for everyone else. None of these ideas do anything to help America's working class. In fact, they actively make it harder for working people to, as Congressman Duffy put it, "move up the economic ladder."
Let's start out with taxes. The idea that cutting taxes for rich somehow helps everyone has become a religion of sorts for many people on the right. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush put cutting taxes for rich people at the center of their agendas, and to this day many people in the conservative movement still believe that cutting taxes for rich people is the only way to grow the economy and build a middle-class. Those conservatives have even repeated this lie so often that a surprising number of everyday Americans believe the same thing about tax breaks for rich people.
But Republican tax breaks for the rich don't help everyday people - they hurt them.
Comment: This is a classis example of secondary ponerological association. Educate yourself and read the book by Andrew Lobaczewski called Political Ponerology.