Hillary, the Rich and the Poor - Part 2

On Sunday Fareed Zakaria discussed the book Listen, Liberalwith its author, Thomas Frank.  It sounds like its thesis is that the Democratic party has ignored the middle class for at least a generation.  This follows my earlier post about Hillary, the Rich, and the Poor.  A description of Frank’s book says: 

Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and yet the decline of the middle class has only accelerated. Wall Street gets its bailouts, wages keep falling, and the free-trade deals keep coming.

Basically, Bill and Hillary offer food stamps to the poor while they pour much greater tax benefits to the rich.  The Fiscal Times says the Food Stamp program (SNAP) costs about $74 billion per year.  Reuters says the Congressional Budget Office estimates that tax breaks will cost about $12 billion over ten years, or a little over $1 trillion per year, greatly dwarfing the cost of food stamps.  The article adds that the top 20% of income earners will recive more than half of these tax benefits, i.e., about $500 billion per year. 

Bill, Hillary, and their Democratic colleagues basically buy the votes of poor blacks, by offering welfare programs like food stamps, while their big giveaways are really to the wealthy, who give them the campaign funds to keep them in office and keep the scam going. 

As I and Thomas Frank noted, the Clintons and the Democrats skip over the middle class, which they take for granted.  It’s possible that both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are making public the Clinton’s contempt for the middle class, and the middle class is unhappy about it.  The Republicans have played half the game as well, aiding the rich, but shortchanging both the poor and the middle class.