Free Republic

Working class residents are fleeing New York City because it’s too expensive, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Monday. The congresswoman made the claim during a discussion of the migrant crisis and Mayor Eric Adams’ controversial across-the-board proposed budget cuts that would shrink the police force and trim spending on schools, libraries and cultural arts programs. During her tele-town hall meeting, she wondered why the mayor and council weren’t looking to boost taxes on the wealthy — such as pricey pied-à-terre or luxury crash pads for the jet-setting ultra rich.

Last week, a shocking moment of truth broke through the huge effort elites normally put into hiding their disdain for the rest of us. At an event sponsored by the libertarian Cato Institute, President of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Adam Posen—a man who appears to be paid $450,000 a year—made clear his absolute contempt for the working class.

On Aug. 2, I watched as a majority of voters in the county where I grew up (Seward County) in rural Kansas — a county that went for Trump by 29 points in 2020 — voted against the proposed constitutional amendment that would allow for an abortion ban. Statewide, voters rejected the ban by a stunning double-digit margin. I am part of a new generation of Latina leaders in Democratic politics, and there’s buzz in progressive circles about that vote in Kansas. It boosted optimism for the 2022 election, with good reason — if we understand the right lessons.

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” Democratic strategist and CNN Contributor Paul Begala criticized proposals for President Joe Biden to forgive student loan debt by stating that “Democrats have gone from being the party of the factory floor to being the party of the faculty lounge.” And Democrats should “go back to their roots, which is, earn it.”

In the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary, decades of dissonance between the party's aggrieved grassroots and its blinkered elite spilled out into the open. For years, the chasm widened between the GOP's heartland base, the river valley-dwelling "Somewheres" from David Goodhart's 2017 book, "The Road to Somewhere," and the party's bicoastal "Anywhere" rulers. The foot-soldier Republican "Somewheres," disproportionately church-attending and victimized by job outsourcing and the opioid crisis, felt betrayed by the more secular, ideologically inflexible Republican "Anywheres." Donald Trump, lifelong conservative "outsider" and populist dissenter from bicoastal "Anywhere" orthodoxy on issues pertaining to trade, immigration and China, coasted to...

Just look at the issues the Democrats are pushing: defunding the police, which hurts mostly poor and working-class neighborhoods; critical race theory, which mostly interests woke white activists (and rich-and-guilty Dem donors) but which actually sends a message of inferiority to minority youths; gender ideology, which plays less well among the more traditional and more religious working-class minorities; environmental policies that produce higher gas prices and lower employment, while pushing food prices up; open borders that drive down wages for downscale workers; and so on. Donors and activists love this stuff. They live in neighborhoods that are mostly insulated from...

The attempted denigration of Jane Austen reveals how upscale, white elites view caring about anti-racism as a marker of status.The woke may regret going after Jane Austen. Last month it was reported that exhibits at the Jane Austen Museum were being revamped as staff are“re-evaluating Jane Austen’s place in ‘Regency-era colonialism’ in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests.” This attempt to evaluate Austen according to the American upper class’s current racial obsessions mostly reveals the blind spots those obsessions encourage. Many of Austen’s fans were furious at this attempted denigration of the great authoress. This anger was intensified by...

When half the working class is facing economic devastation and the other half still has to show up to work, are we really all in this together? I’m a lawyer in New York City, currently working from home due to the coronavirus shutdown. For me it’s working quite well. Almost all of my work was done on computer, internet, and phone even when I was doing it in an office, so doing it from a home equipped with a computer, internet, and phone is not really much of an inconvenience. In fact, comparing the distance from my home to my...

Democrat strategist James Carville warned that the smug, urbanist mindset is causing the Democratic Party to be distracted by the wrong issues. Democratic strategist James Carville unleashed on 2020 Democratic candidates for pulling the party too far left and warned Democrats are at risk of seeming “culturally arrogant” to the working class. His rant began on a viral MSNBC segment this week after the chaos of the Iowa caucuses, then he extended his admonishments in an interview with Vox.Vox Writer Sean Illing seemed to question whether Carville’s strong reaction was warranted. Are Democrats “really destroying the party?” he asked. “What...

Working class communities deserted Jeremy Corbyn and Labour in huge numbers after Boris Johnson's vow to get Brexit done, a damning new election analysis shows today. The Tories won over the DE social class made up of the unemployed and unskilled workers by 13 points, an astonishing gulf for a Conservative leader. The lead, 47 per cent to 34 per cent - swallowed up Jeremy Corbyn's three point advantage among the same group in the 2017 election. And it also dwarfs the eight point lead that Ed Miliband enjoyed in 2015, which prompted his resignation as Labour leader. In more...

This cohort leans Republican now more than ever; a Gallup poll this year shows they favor the GOP by a whopping 25 percentage points. It was as if the Democratic Party didn’t understand how much they needed labor. Oddly, it appears they still don’t. “The working-class voters in my county tend to wonder if the party still wants them,” says Mark Hackel, the Democratic chief executive of Macomb County, Mich., where voters favored Trump over Clinton by 11 percentage points. “They’re not really sure where they fit in.” Mike Mikus, a Democratic strategist who helped guide Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s...

Democrats are choking on crow for opposing this tax bill. Are they this economically illiterate? You pass the most extensive tax reform in nearly 30 years, it creates a better job creating and investing environment, and companies begin to boost U.S. investment, dole out bonuses to workers, some increase wages, and make declarations that charitable donations will go up. Yeah, that sounds bad, or something. It all centers on the notion that the Left thinks that your money is their money, and that the government, preferably run by over-educated, snobby liberal elitists, know best to allocate how that money is...

Well, Democratic spin surely has the middle class skeptical of the Republican tax bill. On Friday, President Trump signed the most extensive tax reform in 30 years. It was framed as a giveaway to the wealthy and something akin to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by congressional Democrats. Not a single Democrat voted for the bill. In reality, itÂ’s a middle class tax cut. Eighty percent of Americans for at least the next eight years will be paying less. The analysis says it. And now CBS News spoke to three families from Providence, Rhode Island, Fresno, California, and Cary,...

<p>I calculated federal income taxes for two hypothetical working class couples filing jointly under the new senate proposal compared to current law, taking the standard deduction in each case (see the pdf at source).</p> <p>The first working class family has a combined income of $100,000 and if my calculations are NOW correct would owe $10,948 in federal income taxes under current law with an effective tax rate of 10.9%.</p>

A recently-released research study sheds light on the values of white working-class voters in the United States and the reasons these voters strongly supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Three researchers from three different universities authored the study, titled “White Working-Class Views on Belonging, Change, Identity and Immigration.” Open Society Foundations, a network of political organizations controlled by left-wing billionaire George Soros, funded the study. The trio of researchers conducted the study by visiting four places between August 2016 and March 2017: Birmingham, Alabama; Dayton, Ohio; Tacoma, Washington; Phoenix, Arizona; and — for some reason — the New...

In the US, death rates for middle-aged white working-class Americans are bucking a global trend. Instead of falling as treatments for killers like heart disease and cancer improve, death rates for white Americans without a college degree are on the rise, largely driven by increased rates of drug overdose, suicide, and alcohol use. These are considered "deaths of despair," Princeton professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton write in a new Brookings Paper on Economic Activity that describes the trend. The study follows up on Case and Deaton's previous work, which caused a stir in 2015 when it first revealed these...

By embracing Donald Trump, the building trades are selling out the movement for greater equality for all working people. Days after the inauguration, the leaders of several building trade unions met with President Donald Trump at the White House, outraging those on the left who want organized labor to lead the resistance to the president’s anti-worker policies. The building trades cited Trump’s call for infrastructure investment and their warm personal relationship with him as reasons to be optimistic about his presidency. As reported in The New York Times, Sean McGarvey, president of North America’s Building Trade Unions, stated, “We have...

Many of the dominant images from President Trump’s first 10 days in office make it look as if the country is turning on him. The millions who protested him at women’s marches across the country. The thousands who jammed airports over the weekend to support immigrants and refugees hurt by his travel ban. Nevertheless, it’s unlikely any of this early backlash will mean much to the swing-state voters who sent Trump to the White House to deliver a message that the political system wasn’t working for them. “Is the white, blue-collar voter in Pennsylvania going to be upset by all...

Determined to hold around two dozen Senate seats in 2018, Democrats will use the coming series of confirmation hearings to try to distinguish themselves from President-elect Donald Trump’s billionaire nominees and convince working-class voters who elected him that he’s not on their side. While Democrats have little leverage to stop the Republican’s picks in the Senate, they still plan a fight. To highlight what they say is the hypocrisy of Trump’s campaign promise to be a champion for the economically struggling little guy, they’ll focus on the nominees’ wealth, ties to Wall Street and willingness to privatize Medicare, among other...

ITALY is set to deal a hammer blow to its government as the latest polls revealed voters will punish Matteo Renzi's administration in the upcoming referendum. The prime minister's failure to reach out to working class suggest large regions will snub Mr Renzi's plan for constitutional reform. A Demos poll has revealed Mr Renzi's reforms will be rejected by an 11 percentage point margin in the south of the country - where most of the poorest regions are located - compared with a seven-point margin across the country. As the nation prepares for a momentous referendum, which could spark an...