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To The Reader's Forum:
Without question, our representatives should promote the general welfare above powerful minority, special interests in our national economic policies. A representative, democratic government can behave in no other manner and continue to claim to be representative.
It is not the so-called "elitist" Democrats, however, who left the working class behind; it was and is the Republicans.
For decades, our politicians, especially conservative politicians, embraced economic policies based, in large part, on supply-side economic theory, that rewards the accumulation of wealth from wealth and not from labor. And since the beginning of Trump's second term as president, Trump and the MAGA "Republicans" have continued to do so with little or no restraint.
Disingenuously, these very same politicians blame the poor, or Democratic socioeconomic policies, for the working class's meagre condition instead of their own economic policies that created the working class's dire situation, all while putting more money in the pockets of the wealthiest Americans.
The overall rise of the cost of living over the past several decades without offsetting livable wages and benefits have placed the bottom 50% of our population in a dire situation, owning a mere 2.5% of the wealth in this country. In stark contrast, the upper 10% of our population own 67% of the wealth in the United States today.
You can thank Reagan and the GOP's unwavering support for his "voodoo economics" for this income-wealth gap in America today, as their policies replaced Adam Smith's philosophy of capitalism -- self-interest guided by the "invisible hand" of "moral sentiments" -- with exclusionary selfishness.
Maurice F. Baggiano
published legal author, former adjunct faculty member at Gannon University (Erie, PA) and the Rochester Institute of Technology, member of the Bar of the U.S. Supreme Court
Jamestown